Ways It Didn't Happen
by Iniga
Summary: Collection of ficlets in which Booth and Brennan get together. First: The Boy With the Answer episode tag. Second: Alternate 100th episode. Third: Dwarf in the Dirt Crackfic. Fourth: Teen AU.
1. The Boy With the Answer

_**Ways It Didn't Happen: The Boy With the Answer, Season 5**_

 **Summary** : _Collection of one-shots in which Booth and Brennan get together. First up: While recovering from the Gravedigger trial with Hodgins, Angela, and Booth, it occurs to Brennan that she can change. Set after The Boy With the Answer (S5). Because everyone else wrote a BWTA fic 5 years ago, so I can certainly have one now._

 **Disclaimer** : _I own nothing related to Bones and no money is being made from this work of fan fiction._

 **Note/Spoilers** : _Everything through season 5 is fair game. Major references are to The Boy With the Answer, The Hero in the Hold, and Aliens in a Spaceship. (The first three Gravedigger episodes.) Basic plot of The Boy With the Answer: Brennan/Hodgins/Booth drop their charges against Heather Taffet in order to work the case of her most recent victim without a conflict of interest. Taffet discredits most of Team Jeffersonian as expert witnesses but is found guilty. Everyone celebrates the verdict as well as the revelation that Hodgins and Angela had secretly gotten married in the previous episode. The last scene is Booth putting Brennan in a cab outside the Founding Fathers; she turns and watches him as the cab drives away. And here I change things for my own fanficcy indulgence..._

* * *

The cab door slammed behind Temperance Brennan and she screamed.

The nightmare that she'd been having for two weeks straight didn't seem to care that she was wide awake in the middle of the crowded street outside the Founding Fathers. It insisted on making itself known in the most inappropriate possible place.

Hodgins, bleeding.

Booth, drowning.

And Heather Taffet, the Gravedigger, smirking as she stepped forward to seal Brennan into her own grave.

There wasn't enough oxygen in the car.

" _Booth_!" she screamed, not that he could hear her because she was buried alive or he had drowned or both.

She blinked and she was standing on the sidewalk again, her legs shaking, Booth holding her steady with one arm and tipping the cab driver for his trouble with the other.

Hodgins and Angela had strolled off in wedded bliss with their crowd of well-wishers a moment before, but now they were back, confetti still clinging to their hair.

"Sweetie?" Angela was petting Brennan's hair, and Brennan was shaking too hard to brush her friend's hands away.

"We heard you scream from down the block," said Hodgins, one hand stroking her arm, which seemed strange. She'd been hugging him and toasting his marriage and celebrating Taffet's downfall with him all night, but all throughout the trial he had been angry with her. Angry at the situation, really, but it had felt like he'd been angry at her. "What happened?"

"She got into a cab and freaked out," Booth explained for her. "Everything's fine now."

"I'm sorry," Brennan managed, the old, hated, foster care reflex apology for nothing that she would have made as a teenager. "I don't know what happened."

Hodgins scoffed. "We just finished testifying against the woman who locked us in a car and buried us alive, and you freaked out when you were shut into a car being driven by someone you don't know. I don't think we need to call in Sweets to do a psych profile for this one."

That made Brennan straighten up, finally secure on her own two feet again. She shrugged away from Booth and Angela and immediately missed their warmth. But just because she missed it didn't mean she needed it.

"So you think she was right when she said my testimony should be thrown out because I'm too crazy and obsessed with what happened to us to know what happened to that little boy's bones?"

For once, Hodgins wasn't looking for an argument. "No, I think this is the most normal thing you've done in a week. Do you think I would get in one of those things to go home?"

"How are you getting home, then?"

His face lit up the way it usually did right before he declared himself King of the Lab. "Limo. Very large stretch limo with a lot of alcohol and a top that will be staying open."

"Nice," said Booth.

"Thanks," said Hodgins.

Angela reached for Brennan's hands again. "Come home with us."

She shook her head. "I don't need a babysitter. I definitely don't need _two_ babysitters who are supposed to be on their honeymoon."

"Believe me," said Angela. "When we're on our honeymoon you'll know it."

"This is why we didn't tell people we were married," Hodgins added. "We didn't want the Gravedigger to ruin our celebration. But we also didn't want a piece of paper that doesn't change what was always true anyway to keep us from doing what we had to do for this case."

"We've done what we had to do," Brennan pointed out.

"No, because the last thing we have to do is recover so we'll be ready for the next one. She doesn't get to put us out of commission. Except for tonight, because tonight we're getting drunk. More drunk."

"I want to be alone," she pleaded. "I need space."

"You've seen Hodgins' house?" Angela asked wryly. "Nothing but space. We'll put you in a bedroom way down along the corridor with all the chandeliers, and you can be nice and quiet and alone if that's what you really want. But if you wake up from some dream where someone's burying you alive or trying to take Booth away from you, you'll know we're right here and you can come see us." She flicked her eyes to Booth. "Of course, that works better if you come, too."

Booth met Brennan's eyes, and she read the message there as clearly as if he had spoken. He would do whatever she wanted.

Angela smirked. Angela could read Booth's eyes, too, which wasn't quite fair since Angela didn't feel like there was a knife twisting in her stomach every minute of every day because Booth was always in danger.

"Come on, Booth," said Angela ingratiatingly. "You appreciate the value of having a few more drinks and stumbling upstairs to the thousand thread count sheets, knowing that you don't have to worry about whether she's okay because she's right next door."

"And pizza," said Hodgins. "More pizza tonight, and greasy breakfast sandwiches tomorrow when we're all hungover." He glanced and Brennan. "Plus whatever vegetarians eat for hangovers."

"I do like pizza and greasy breakfast sandwiches," said Booth.

"Don't do this," Brennan pleaded with Angela and Hodgins. "Don't make him do this."

"Make me drink and eat pizza? I pretty much do those things voluntarily, Bones. You know that."

"Make him do the thing where he pretends I'm doing him a favor when he's really trying to take care of me."

"Nobody's pretending anything, Bones," he whispered, and the horrible twisting in her stomach intensified. Maybe she should drink another bottle of wine. Anything to stop the creeping feeling for five minutes.

"Let's look at this rationally," said Hodgins, and his eyes twinkled again. He was going to try to beat her with logic, and she was concerned that he was going to succeed. "You can't stand here all night. You can't go back to work because Cam barred us all from the lab until tomorrow afternoon. You can't take the Metro to your very nice apartment, because your very nice apartment isn't on the Metro. You can't drive because you've had too much to drink. You can't take a cab because right this second that's your idea of torture just as much as it's mine. The only rational decision is…"

She was silent. Hodgins wasn't wrong, but just on principle she didn't want to give him an opportunity to crown himself King of the Sidewalk.

Actually, after the day they'd had, she _did_ want that.

She had to break herself from wanting those things.

But she'd do that tomorrow.

For now, she'd take a page out of Booth's book and take care of them by letting them think they were taking care of her. She couldn't let them stand on the street all night arguing with her or let them go home and worry about her.

"You're right, Hodgins. You're King of the Sidewalk."

He grinned and raised his arms in victory.

It chased the image of him bleeding and gasping and telling her that she'd better write that goodbye note from her mind's eye, at least for the moment.

* * *

She'd been in limousines before, of course. Usually they were sent by her publisher to take her to a reading or a signing; sometimes they were sent by a university where she was giving a lecture.

It had never felt anything like this, full of shouting and laughter, and, as Hodgins had promised, a lot of alcohol and a sunroof open to expose the starry sky of a pleasant spring night. She closed her eyes and relished the feel of the fresh air caressing her face.

She wasn't trapped.

She and Booth weren't quite touching, but she could smell him next to her- the last echoes of his aftershave and deodorant after a very long day, as well as his own scent which she would never admit to knowing and craving- and that felt even better.

He wasn't trapped.

Angela and Hodgins and Booth starting talking about trips to proms taken in limos not quite like this one. That was just one of many typical adolescent milestones that Brennan had never hit.

But she'd danced with Booth at her high school reunion and that had been enough to make up for it. It had to be.

They moved up the adolescent food chain once they reached Hodgins' estate (calling it a house was so oversimplified as to be inaccurate). Sitting on the floor (ignoring the perfectly good furniture) with pizza and beer (although Brennan and Angela still had wine) was apparently supposed to sum up the entirety of the college experience.

That and sex.

She hadn't had sex in college either. She could have, of course, but it had been far more rational to wait for a properly level-headed, experienced partner and there weren't many of those to be found among teenaged boys. There were better options in graduate school where the men were older and smarter and had actual life experience.

College had still been vastly superior to high school. More of the students, even most of the students, had been there to learn. No one knew that she was the girl whose family had vanished or died and who had been left to the tender ministrations of the foster care system because there was no one in the world who cared enough to take her in. Instead of one custodian who favored her with small kindnesses wherever he could, there had been departments full of decorated professors whose offices were always open so that she could learn more, more, more.

She had been content in college even if she had never gone to the kind of three-day-long naked party Angela was currently describing in vivid detail. It was anthropologically fascinating, and maybe Brennan would ask Angela to retell the story sometime when she wasn't exhausted and intoxicated.

Then Booth started telling a story, one she'd heard before, about the pranks his fraternity had played when he'd been in college. She let his voice wrap around her and studied him as he spoke.

His bone structure was mesmerizing. Especially the jawline.

And then there were his eyes, which were warm and brown and _not_ , contrary to the claims made by the crazy cousin her father had produced the previous Christmas, too close together.

Then his lips, which she knew were even better at kissing than they were at saying exactly the right thing at exactly the right time.

And the broad shoulders, and the strong arms, and the hands that were always steady on the trigger of a gun or guiding her while they worked side by side.

She liked looking at Booth more than she liked almost anything else in the world.

It was just as well that Hodgins and Angela were too engaged in the story (she still didn't understand how these pranks were funny rather than sociopathic) to notice how hard she was staring.

Then, abruptly, the topic of conversation switched to how Cam had managed to start dating the gynecologist she had chosen to treat her still-new daughter Michelle, and all the potential drama that might ensue. Booth and Hodgins flinched every time Angela and Brennan said the word "gynecologist," so they said it far more often than was strictly necessary, particularly after they realized that Booth and Hodgins had started gulping their drinks every time the word came up.

By the time Brennan hugged everyone goodnight and climbed into her assigned bed, Heather Taffet was nowhere in her thoughts.

The room spun a little as she pulled the quilt over her body. She wasn't slurring her words or in danger of vomiting, but it had been a long time since she'd had this much to drink.

Sleep came almost instantly.

* * *

" _Bones_!"

She could hear him screaming for her long before they reached the ship, but there was no way to get to him any faster.

" _Bones_!"

The closer she got, the fainter his voice sounded.

By the time she saw him, he couldn't yell any more. His lungs were filled with water and she couldn't open the cabin door.

All she could do was watch him die.

Slowly.

Painfully.

Alone.

Because of her.

* * *

She woke up with tears and sweat mixing on her cheeks. The clock beside the bed showed that she had been asleep for three hours. That made sense. The first stage of REM sleep usually occured after about 90 minutes, but the alcohol she had consumed would have suppressed it. That would have prompted REM rebound, meaning that after three hours her dreams would naturally be all the more intense.

The dream about watching Booth drown had been intense enough without any help.

She got out of bed and walked into the ensuite bathroom. Angela had turned on a night light so that there would be no difficulty in finding her way.

Angela had also left a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of water on the counter next to a new toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste.

Angela thought of everything, and Brennan loved her. She felt a quick flash of fury for the way Taffet had discredited Angela's work on the witness stand, claiming that Angela's work was less than informed, thorough, and conscientious.

All necessities taken care of, Brennan looked again at the clock. On a normal day, it would be almost time to get up to get in some writing or a self-defense class before breakfast and work.

It wasn't a normal day. Cam had told them not to come to work until the afternoon, with the caveat that she would have instructed them to take the entire day off had they not all been insane workaholics who would probably have gone into withdrawal had she banned them from the lab for twenty-four hours.

Cam hadn't phrased that very politely, now that Brennan thought about it.

She wasn't drunk any longer, and she wasn't going to have a proper hangover either. She was merely groggy, tired, and dehydrated. That was probably the best possible outcome, she mused, as she sat cross-legged on the bed, the mostly-empty water bottle still in her hand.

If she hadn't been looking in the direction of the door anyway, in the muted glow of the night light, she never would have noticed how very slightly it moved.

She waited and listened intently. There was no sound when the door moved again.

She smiled. She only knew one person who could enter a room that quietly, and since he was supposed to be asleep next door, she was quite confident that she knew what was happening.

"Booth," she called into the dimness. "Stop doing your sniper walk and come in here like a normal person."

He obeyed, a slightly sheepish smile on his face. "I didn't want to wake you if you managed to stay asleep for more than three hours."

She shook her head. "REM rebound," she told him, and explained the phenomenon.

"Huh." He closed the door behind himself and sat next to her on the bed. "There's a name for that."

"There's a name for most things."

"Mmm," he said noncommittally. "So you were dreaming?"

"Same dream I told you about before," she admitted. "The one where you drown because I can't get to you fast enough."

His arms went around her the way they always did right when she needed them the most. "You got to me."

"What did you dream?" she asked.

He laughed humorlessly against her. "What do you think? Not being able to pull you out of the sand before you suffocated."

"But you got to me," she echoed.

"Yeah. But I needed to see you and make sure you were okay. That's why I was sneaking into your room."

"I figured." She sighed against him, wishing that they could always be like this and knowing that they couldn't. "This has to stop."

"She's in prison," Booth said, choosing to take the narrowest possible interpretation of her words.

"She told me it isn't over."

"The psychos always say that." Booth rubbed a circle on her back. "I don't think we're going to be hearing from her again. If we do, you know I'll protect you."

"That's what I'm afraid of. It's me she wants to beat now. Not you, not Hodgins. Me. And she's not stupid. She knows that I'd rather die than lose you, so she'll try to hurt you."

"We won't let that happen either," Booth murmured. "I'm pretty good at taking care of myself."

"Pretty good isn't good enough. You've said it- you've said it at least twice in the last month. That you'd die for me. Heather Taffet wants to make that happen."

"Heather Taffet is in prison," Booth repeated.

"She is very, very intelligent."

"Not as intelligent as you."

"But she doesn't have feelings getting in the way," Brennan protested. They'd had this conversation already, a day or two before. They'd set it aside in order to focus on connecting Taffet to her final victim. The issue, though, was still there. "I couldn't think as clearly as she did because I love… Angela. I love Angela. And I love Hodgins. And I love you. I did not get to be one of the preeminent anthropologists in the world by going around loving people!"

And Booth laughed at her.

Booth was usually good at not laughing at her when she was being serious.

She would have stomped out of the room, but she didn't have anywhere to go. Besides, she wasn't ready to let go of Booth.

He tightened his grip on her as if he had felt the thought pass through her mind. "Out of all the geniuses you've met, who had the best, most genius brain of them all?"

"Zack," she conceded readily.

"And where did Zack end up when he took logic and rationality as far as he could?"

She decided not to dignify that with a response. Booth had never really liked Zack anyway.

"Zack ended up in just about the same place as Heather Taffet, didn't he?" Booth continued. "We beat Gormagon and we beat the Gravedigger. The reason we can do that is because we're a team. When she kidnapped you and you hotwired the car and sent that text, we had to figure out which of you was sending the message to which of us. We could do that because we knew you. When we went past the deadline and we knew that you should have run out of oxygen, we kept looking because we knew you would find a way to buy yourselves some extra time. When you blew up the airbag, I saw the explosion and I knew what I was looking at because I know how you think. The day after you got out of the hospital, when we went to church together, I told you that I thanked God for the whole team because it took the whole team to beat the Gravedigger that day, the same way it took the whole team to beat the Gravedigger in court today. She discredited you and Angela on the stand, but then there was that dust mite."

"That we might not have found if you hadn't told me that Parker would have bitten someone who tried to kidnap him."

"It's what kids do," said Booth modestly. She remembered when she'd first met him. She hadn't thought he was capable of modesty. She had been wrong about so many things, and most of them came back to Booth.

Her eyes fell again on the water bottle. "Did you drink a glass of water and take aspirin when you woke up?" she asked. She'd been letting him take care of her, and as usual that meant he wasn't with someone who would take care of him. Like Catherine Bryar. She was all right. There wasn't any reason that Booth shouldn't date her.

"Yes," said Booth. "Nice of Angela to have those as party favors."

"Are you feeling all right?" she asked.

"Yes," he answered slowly. "You don't need to worry about me, Bones."

"But I worry about you all the time."

"Like I told you before. Think of the trial like a root canal with novocaine. You won't feel normal right away. Don't operate any heavy machinery, literal or metaphorical."

"This didn't start with the trial. It started with Sweets' paper."

"The one that says we're in love with each other."

"I certainly haven't read any of his other papers."

"We don't need to have this conversation again. You told me that it is never going to happen and you are never going to love me in that way, and I heard you loud and clear."

Brennan blinked in confusion. "That's not what I said."

All of a sudden his body stiffened. For the first time all night, patience and solicitousness were replaced with annoyance. "By all means, enlighten me, Bones. Tell me what you said."

"Well, I did say that it could never happen." Her heart pounded in her ears. "But I love you in all the ways. I didn't think I could. I still don't think I can be what you deserve."

"What do I deserve, then?" His face was an inch away from hers. If she wasn't careful he was going to kiss her again, and that was not what she had meant for him to do.

She was so tired. Tired of murder and death and serial killers and vengeance and pain and her feelings for this man that refused to be pushed aside or compartmentalized.

"You deserve everything you want. You deserve peace and happiness and a woman who appreciates that you're good and decent and selfless and and loyal and brave and determined and a wonderful father and a wonderful grandson and a wonderful friend."

He smiled in the way particular to him, where he only moved one half of his upper lip. "Which of those things don't you appreciate?"

"I don't like psychiatry," she said, as if he needed reminding. "But those things Sweets wrote about me were true. That when my parents left it broke me. All those things you and Hodgins and Angela were talking about last night, all of those things you did in high school and college, I was broken and I didn't do them. You saw what happened when you pretended to be my husband at my high school reunion. No one could believe it. Everyone knew you were way out of my association."

Booth wrinkled his eyes in confusion and shook his head. " _League,_ Bones. Out of your _league_ , and no I'm not. Anyway, none of the men thought that. The woman said catty things because the men were looking at you. If we'd been anywhere else but your high school, you would have known that. _That's_ what this is about?"

"You're the White Knight who tries to fix everything for everyone."

"I don't try to fix everything for everyone," Booth grumbled defensively.

"Let's ask Jared what he thinks about that."

"My brother's an idiot. No one cares what he thinks."

"I can't condemn you to spending the rest of your life trying to fix me."

"That wouldn't happen, because I don't think you're broken. You said that you can't change. I don't think you need to. I have faith in you. I'd say I wish you had enough faith in me to know that I don't need to be protected from you, but then you'd just tell me that you don't believe in faith."

"When Hodgins and I were in that car," she said, "He wrote a goodbye letter to Angela. I didn't want to write one. I said it didn't matter because you would find us. He said that I had a lot of faith in you."

Booth rolled his eyes. "You told him that it wasn't faith, that you had empirical evidence that I always solve the case."

"Then I told him to shut up and stop wasting our limited oxygen supply," Brennan agreed.

Booth laughed. "I usually just hang up on him when I feel like he's wasting the universe's limited oxygen supply."

"He did get me to agree to write a letter right before we blew up the airbag."

"A letter to me?"

"It's always you."

"You never gave it to me."

"Well, I didn't die."

"Do you still have it?"

"Somewhere. Hidden. Not here." His face fell, and she hated it when that happened. "It said how much I cared about you and how much I respected you and how much better you make me. Those were things I couldn't say to you then. Even when the FBI told me you were dead, I couldn't tell you why I was so angry because I couldn't tell you how much I cared about you and how much it hurt when I thought I lost you. But I can tell you that now. I can tell you I love you. I can…" She felt her own eyes widen at the unexpected revelation. "I can change."

It was a more stunning discovery than any she had ever made in the lab. "My parents left, but I didn't understand that they wanted to protect me. My father came back when he could. He went to prison so that I could start to forgive him. He wanted to murder the Gravedigger for me, and even though I still wish he'd buy me a sweater like a normal father, I know that it's because he loves me. And I love him, and I forgive him, and I didn't think that could ever happen. Russ, too. I used to be angry that he didn't keep custody of me, but now I know he knew his limits and they aren't the same as mine. I love him, and I love his daughters, and I told him that if anything ever happened to him and Amy I would raise the girls and I could do it if I had to. In high school everyone hated me, but they don't anymore. The people I see every day _like_ me now."

"Yes, we do, Bones," he said quietly. She felt his words more than heard them as her mind rushed to organize her thoughts in a new way.

"When Hodgins and I were in that car, we were mostly colleagues but it was different after we got out and it's different now. It's not just that I respect his intellect. I told him he was King of the Sidewalk tonight because I wanted to make him smile because it makes me happy when he's happy. I didn't have friends for a long, long time. There were professional acquaintances but not really friend-friends, until Angela, but I didn't count that because she's Angela, and she loves everyone and everyone loves her, except Taffet. What Taffet said about her at the trial didn't just make me mad because she disregarded the science. It made me mad because she disregarded _Angela_. I didn't used to feel like that. It upset me that I thought I was getting too far away from logic, but what I should have realized was that that meant I can _change_."

The constant fear in the pit of her stomach was almost gone, she noticed.

"And you," she said, finally staring into Booth's eyes _that were not anything like too close together._ "Mostly you. When I first met you, I thought you were arrogant, and sometimes you are, but you're as good as you think you are. Sometimes you're better than you think you are. I watch you worrying about whether you're doing all the right things with Parker when no child could ever ask for a better parent than you. I didn't think I'd be able to work with you, but I could. I didn't think I'd be able to trust you enough to tell you what scares me, but I can. I did not foresee getting nightmares about someone hurting you because whether we're romantically involved or whether we're not, that's how much you matter to me. I'd do anything for you. I'd break my own heart to protect you." She swallowed hard. "I'm not usually wrong, but this one time, I was. I missed the relevant evidence. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have told you no. I should have told you that I will try as hard as I can to get you those thirty or forty or fifty years."

Booth was sitting right in front of her, on the tangled sheets of her bed, wearing boxers and a t-shirt and exhausted but affectionate smile on his face. She put one hand behind his back and the other in his short hair and kissed him.

He kissed her back. His hands roamed everywhere that he could reach, and she moaned when his lips moved from her cheek to her neck.

This had been coming for five years, she decided. There was no reason to wait any longer. She slipped her fingers inside the waistband of his boxers only for him to recoil.

"I can't let you do that, Bones."

"Why not?" she whined.

"The old root canal, novocaine thing," he told her. She could hear the regret in his voice, but it didn't mollify her frustration. "Plus, you've been drinking."

"The alcohol is out of my system!" she objected. "You know it's been long enough. You're sober, too, aren't you?"

"Sober as a judge."

"I'm pretty sure half the judges we testify before have drinking problems."

"You're right. Stupid expression."

She leaned forward to kiss him again. She'd done enough admitting that she'd been wrong that night. He could admit that he was wrong about the sex thing as well as the judge thing.

The kiss was returned, but it was gentle and chaste. "I mean it, Bones. If you still feel this way next week, then we'll take two days off of work and I'll make love to you on every horizontal surface in your apartment."

"Only the horizontal ones?" she teased, exaggerating her pout. "Because I'd like you to push me up against that exposed brick wall in my living room, and then-"

"Okay." He grinned, and the grin shot warmth through every inch of her body. "All surfaces, then."

"Terms are acceptable," she agreed. "However, the parameters of the deal extend only to sexual intercourse. Kissing is not included because we have kissed on multiple occasions prior to tonight."

She concluded that he was amenable to the newly defined parameters when his mouth closed over hers, desperate and demanding this time. She didn't know how long they spent exploring and teasing and comforting. She did know that she didn't feel remotely similar to how she had felt with other men- not even the ones like Sully, who she'd liked and respected and gotten to know outside the bedroom. This was different. She was different. She was changing.

To her chagrin, she felt her body growing warm and heavy with the need for sleep.

"Sun's coming up," Booth murmured in her ear. "Maybe we should take a nap before breakfast?"

She forced her eyes open. "Can we watch the sunrise first?"

"There's a balcony at the end of the hall." He offered her his hand and they stole together into the dark, quiet corridor, that was, as Angela had promised, lined with chandeliers. Brennan hadn't really noticed the night before.

They made it to the balcony just in time. The dully pink sky exploded into oranges, purples, and blues before settling into an early morning gray-yellow. Brennan nodded to herself as she led Booth back to her bedroom.

"Angela was right," she told him.

"About what?"

"She said that sunrises are more beautiful when you watch them with someone you love. Well, she said sunsets but I assume it applies equally to sunrises."

"We'll watch a sunset just to make sure," Booth promised her. "I'll never get in the way of your scientific inquiry."

She kissed him again and directed him toward the bed.

"The sunrise made you forget the terms already?" he asked, although he let her guide him into a reclining position. She could feel his tiredness as acutely as her own.

She shook her head. "Parameters do not extend to kissing or to sharing a bed without intercourse, which we have done multiple times, most recently when we joined the circus to investigate the apparent murder of a pair of conjoined twins."

Booth made a face. "That was awful."

"That they fell from the tightrope and their fellow performers felt that they had to cover up the accident to protect themselves?"

"Well, yeah, that. I was more thinking of having to be that close to you 24-7 and not being able to kiss you, let alone do anything else. Most frustrating week of my entire life."

"I did notice that you were grouchy even for you that week."

"I'm not-" His protests were cut off by a yawn.

She was too tired to argue, too. She cuddled close to him, and meant to ask whether he was comfortable, but the words died in her throat as, for the second time that morning, she fell asleep moments after crawling into bed.

* * *

The next time Brennan awoke, it was to bright sunlight streaming into the room and muffled giggles.

She knew before she opened her eyes that she had slept much longer than expected. She had slept better than she had slept in months, too. She had no memory of her dreams; they hadn't woken her. She couldn't have dreamed of Booth's death then, and that made sense, since her body was still entwined with his.

She could feel that he was awake and his focus was on something or someone other than her.

She opened her eyes.

Angela took that as her cue to stop muffling her giggles and laugh out loud.

"Well done, Booth and Brennan. Wise decision. Feel free to extend your visit for as long as you would like."

"It's not what you think, Angela."

"It damn well better be what I think," said Angela. She bounded out of the room and slammed the door before screaming, presumably in Hodgins' general direction, " _Yeah, they're fine. They're_ _ **exactly**_ _where they're supposed to be!"_

Brennan peeked at Booth out of the corner of her eye. "I was going to tell her, anyway."

"I know you were," said Booth, not at all upset. "Come on. She got her free entertainment. She has to follow through and feed us breakfast. Or brunch. Or lunch. Or whatever."

Brennan's eyes widened as she finally checked the clock. "11:30? We're actually going to be late for work."

"I don't think Cam's likely to punish you too hard."

"She's not going to punish me at all," said Brennan before she realized that Booth was joking. "But you're right. Breakfast and then work. Even if it's only for a few hours. The lab does not stop for gravediggers."

* * *

Breakfast turned out to be blueberry pancakes in concession to Brennan's vegetarianism. They were delicious, so much so that Angela barely took the opportunity to make lascivious comments in between bites.

"How long do you think someone should wait after a stressful experience to make life-altering decisions?" Brennan asked her.

Angela nearly choked. "Sweetie, when I went to check on you this morning it looked to me like you already made the life-altering decision. And it was an excellent decision that you should have made years ago."

"I agree," said Brennan. "Booth says he won't accept my decision for a week."

Booth rolled his eyes and continued eating.

"He thinks he's protecting you. It's actually rather sweet. Let him have this one. It's only a week. It won't hurt anything."

"Thank you," said Booth.

"It's also stupid and unnecessary, and ever so slightly infantilizing," Angela told him.

"Thank you," said Brennan. "But I will accept his decision and use the time to strategize."

"Strategize about _what_?" asked Booth suspiciously.

"How we're going to handle it if the FBI decides that it doesn't want us working together."

"They can do that?" asked Angela.

"They won't," said Booth. "They like our solve rate and our conviction rate too much."

"That's what I'm counting on," Brennan concurred. "But if they do tell you that they have a problem with it, you have to accept it quietly and agree to let them transfer you to some other assignment."

"No!" objected Hodgins, who had been conspicuously silent during discussion of the precise status of Booth and Brennan's relationship. "We're not breaking in another FBI agent. We hate all the other ones."

"You used to hate me, too," said Booth.

"Exactly. It took years to build up a tolerance."

"Anyway, I'm not going to let them transfer me without a fight."

"Yes, you are," said Brennan. "You're taking all the risk and I have all the leverage. You have to let me be the heavy on this one."

"Be the heavy?"

"I used the phrase correctly," she said.

"How exactly are you planning on being the heavy, Sweetie?" Angela put in hastily.

"By refusing to work with another agent. They might think that they can replace him as the liaison, but they know they can't replace me or the rest of the Jeffersonian team. They want our continued cooperation, so they will acquiesce to our terms."

"All right," said Hodgins. "I'm on board with that plan."

"Me too," said Angela. "Everyone will be. Cam might have to pretend she's not, but you know she will be for real, so don't worry about that."

"I won't."

Angela beamed her approval. "Five years ago, could you have imagined this? The four of us sitting here like this?"

"I started imagining the you-and-me part as soon as I met you," Hodgins told her.

"I didn't," said Angela. "Not when you had that smug, superior, I'm-a-genius anger boy thing going on."

"We've been married less than two weeks, Angie. Can we save the stories about how much you didn't like me for at least the first anniversary?"

She leaned around the table and kissed him. "You grew out of it and I love you."

"So what you're saying is that even genius scientists can change," Brennan concluded.

"Smug, superior genius scientists," said Angela. "Don't forget the smug, superior part."

Brennan barely heard her.

Booth's wink across the table was all the confirmation she needed.

 **The End**


	2. Anti-Sweets 100th

_**Ways It Didn't Happen: Anti-Sweets 100th, Season 5**_

 **Summary** : _Collection of one-shots in which Booth and Brennan get together. The latest: I shamelessly indulge my dislike of Sweets. If he's your fave, skip this chapter and come see me next time. :) Alternate 100th episode (S5)._

 **Disclaimer** : _I own nothing related to Bones and no money is being made from this work of fan fiction._

 **Note/Spoilers** : _Everything through season 5 is fair game. Major references are to_ Harbingers in the Fountain _, in which Sweets tells Booth that his brain scans prove that he did not love Brennan prior to brain surgery; and_ The Parts in the Sum of the Whole _, in which Sweets presents his book positing that Booth and Brennan have been in love for some time. (Which is it, Sweets?) Also multiple references to season 3's_ The Pain in the Heart _. You know, the one where Sweets figures it's okay to force Brennan to mourn Booth needlessly because science experiment._

 _Be warned: my Sweets-hating flag is flying for this story. If he's your fave, skip this chapter and come see me next time. :)_

 _Also warning for some language in this chapter. It seems that Booth is a bit displeased._

* * *

He'd never read a book more than twice in his entire life.

He read this one three times in one night.

The first time, he skimmed it hurriedly, vaguely thinking of how he would stop Bones from murdering Sweets. That reading left him with a confused discontent that unnerved him so much that he determined that there was an absolute need to retrace his mental steps.

The second time, he read more carefully while vowing to leave his predictions of what Bones would think out of it. With great effort, he focused only on his own reactions. It had been hard to trust his own feelings for the past year. His brain surgery had left him with strange holes in his memory. He had forgotten that he liked brightly colored socks; he had forgotten that he hated clowns. Most problematically, he had found himself with an intense desire to tell Bones how completely he loved her. He would have done it, too, had Sweets not presented him with a brain scan that proved that his romantic feelings for Bones were no more genuine than his sudden tolerance for clowns. That was what made the conclusion of the manuscript that Sweets had forwarded to Booth and Brennan all the more troubling.

The whole thesis of the fucking thing was that they were in love. Sweets had been working on it for _years_.

The third time, Booth read even more carefully. A cold rage made some people reckless. It made Booth sharp. He catalogued every word that suggested that Sweets had come to his conclusion long before he'd told Booth not to trust his own reality.

He gathered up his copy of the book more harshly than necessary and nearly knocked over a table in the process.

When he had Sweets in front of him, there wasn't going to be a "nearly."

* * *

Booth's fury casually refined itself as he made his way to the Hoover building. As planned, he crossed paths with Bones before they reached Sweets' office to discuss the monstrosity that was _Bones- The Heart of the Matter_. (Sweets had some nerve bringing Booth's personal nickname for his partner right into the title.)

Booth grunted a hello. He had no desire for more pleasant pleasantries.

Brennan's hand was gentle on his arm, but he understood the unspoken command: _stop_! He obeyed willingly.

She evaluated him without comment. Just as he was about to object to her looking at him like he was one of her skeletons, she spoke. "You're angry."

He should have noticed earlier that it was odd that she wasn't angry, too. He was happy to blame that on distraction instead of a broken brain. "You're not?" he asked.

"Sweets is allowed to come to his own conclusions in his own manuscript, wrong as those conclusions may be," she said nonchalantly. Then, her voice dropped with a vulnerability that shook him to his core. "You're that upset that he'd say you're in love with me? Even though everyone else knows that that isn't true?"

"What? No. Of course not, Bones. It's not that. It's the opposite of that. Never mind," he rambled. "But maybe you should let me talk to Sweets by myself. You hate psychology."

"I do, but the book is about me, too. And I want to know why you're so upset. It's been a long time since I've seen you this mad."

It was a reasonable question, a far more reasonable question than many of those that had fallen out of Temperance Brennan's mouth over the years.

He didn't have a reasonable answer. He only had the truth, and God knew that that wasn't something he wanted to share with her.

 _I'm not angry that he wrote that I'm in love with you because I'm not. I'm angry that he wrote that I'm in love with you because I_ _ **am**_ _, and he made me doubt myself._

Her wide light eyes swam with concern. "We're going in there together," she told him firmly. "We're partners and the book is about both of us. Besides, I think you need a witness to say that Sweets was still alive when you left his office."

Booth's laughter felt strange and unexpected in his own throat. "I might need that, now that you mention it."

"Partners protect each other," she told him.

"That's true."

"I could protect you more proficiently if you told me what about that manuscript made you so angry," she suggested.

That was also true. It was true enough that it was tempting. After all, he would have told her how he'd felt months ago if he hadn't deferred to Sweets' judgement.

It wasn't as if Bones wasn't sending signals his way, too. It had been there when she'd leaned into him as he told her that he loved her "in an atta girl way." It had been there when she'd informed a suspect that she had a thing for good boys, not bad boys. It had been there in the way she'd immediately become possessive of Pops. It had been there when they'd lain together under his sink as he'd tried to revive his long-dormant plumbing skills. (Something else he'd blamed on the brain surgery. Fuck Sweets for making him doubt himself.)

"My office," he decided. "This isn't how I wanted to have this discussion at all, but we definitely aren't having it in public."

* * *

He barely managed to shut the door to his office before he told her the whole story: the dream he'd had during his coma, the feelings that had refused to fade while he recovered, his planned confession of love, Sweets' insistence that he didn't know his own mind.

"And then _this_ is what he writes," Booth concluded, slamming the manuscript to the desk with a loud crack. "Even if I were going to give him way more benefit of the doubt than he could possibly deserve, and assume that he decided that I'm in love with you after he swore to me that I'm not, he could have thrown out an _I'm sorry I gaslit you_ instead of dropping his damn book in my lap and hoping I was too stupid to put two and two together."

"Then you are in love with me?" she asked. Her face was impassive and her voice was even. She could have been asking whether he'd finished the paperwork for their last case.

"I have been for a while."

"For a year," she said. "A while is imprecise."

"For a year," he managed, hating every word.

Her eyes flashed with blue-green fire. She turned on her heel and stormed out of his office.

"Bones!" he shouted after her as he gave chase. His own humiliation could wait until he'd assured her that nothing had to change. He'd spent a year steadfastly refusing to act on his feelings. He could keep doing that. She would never know.

It took him a moment to register, with some relief, that she wasn't running away from him so much as she was running toward Sweets' office. Indeed, she gave no sign of objecting when he caught up to her; to the contrary, she adjusted her stride to match his and affectionately bumped his shoulder with her own. That, at least, was a good sign.

She paused when they reached Sweets' door, and entered the office radiating the same deceptive calm she'd had when she'd asked whether Booth was in love with her.

Booth had seen the deception.

Sweets did not.

"You know, I'm used to the two of you being late to your appointments with me, but somehow I didn't think it would happen this time," said Sweets. "Didn't you read the book?"

"I warned you to cut it out," said Brennan coolly.

"We agreed that I would write my book in exchange for providing you with profiling services," said Sweets. "The content and conclusions of the book were never part of the deal. They couldn't be."

Brennan shook her head as if Sweets were being very, very stupid. "You are the one who seems to have forgotten the terms of a deal," she said. "I told you very distinctly that we are not your lab rats and that you were not to do it again."

Something must have clicked in Sweets' mind, because he was suddenly on his feet and backing away from Brennan. "I- I don't know what you mean," he stammered.

"Don't play dumb." She scoffed. "Unless you aren't playing? You did think I wouldn't find out. You thought you could put it down in black and white and, what? He wouldn't notice? He wouldn't tell me? You see, Booth is a far better person than I am. I kept my promise to you. I didn't tell him what you did two years ago. But he told me what you did this time."

Brennan took another step toward Sweets. Sweets was visibly shaking now; Booth could tell that it was taking everything in Sweets not to cower behind the desk, perhaps hitting the panic button that would summon security when he got there.

Booth was about as conflicted as he had ever been in his life. He wanted to watch Bones work over Sweets without interruption, but he wanted to know what Sweets had done two years ago that Bones hadn't told him and he wanted to know _now_.

His mind clicked into overdrive. Two years ago they had been in the midst of the Gormagon case. They had barely known Sweets, and they hadn't especially liked or trusted him. Sweets had over-ridden Booth's wishes and let Bones believe that Pam Nunan's bullet had killed him. Bones had been furious with Booth, but nonchalant regarding Sweets' involvement when Sweets was the one who had made the actual decision. That had never made sense.

Unless Bones had made a deal.

"Doing it to me was one thing," Bones told Sweets. "I'm… well, I won't tell you anything about me. You'd just twist it into a poorly crafted, inaccurate, pseudo-scientific paper. The only thing you need to know was that you should _not_ have done this to Booth. I'll tell you about Booth, even though you won't understand."

She flicked her eyes from Sweets to Booth, and Booth knew that he was the intended recipient of the next portion of Dr. Brennan's lecture.

"Booth is kind," she began, and there was a catch in her throat. "He's kind, and he's decent. Those are things people just say about each other like the words don't have any meaning, but with Booth it's actually true. He likes cartoons and hockey and apple pie. He is raising a son who is beautiful and wonderful. He's courageous, and he's brave, and he cares about justice. He'll sacrifice his body and his feelings for his ideals or for someone he loves. My heart might just be a muscle. Your heart is definitely just a muscle, Dr. Sweets. But Booth's heart…"

She looked lost all of a sudden, and Booth was inclined to grab her and kiss her until she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she'd been found. Sweets be damned.

Sweets, Booth noted, had the nerve to look moved by Bones' distress, too.

"Dr. Brennan," Sweets began.

That was when Bones' vicious right hook struck Sweets in the jaw.

" _All right, Bones!_ " Booth hollered. He'd been waiting for that for two years. His own desire to beat the hell out of Sweets drained away. Watching Bones do it was better.

Watching Bones do it was also more than a little bit of a turn-on. He entertained a brief fantasy of ripping off her clothes and spreading her out on Sweets' desk.

Sweets clutched at his jaw.

Brennan looked at Booth through her long eyelashes. "Hit him again," Booth encouraged. "Really pound him."

"I should have let you go first," she said bashfully.

He felt a smile quirk one corner of his lip. "I've been hanging around you too long," he told her. "I've learned that sometimes it's even better to watch."

She shook her head. "You need to take a turn. I know how you like to hit people. It always makes your day when one of our killers tries to make a run for it and you get to knock him down. You love it when they fight. It puts you in such a good mood."

"I am not a criminal," injected Sweets.

"I'm sure there's some law you've broken," Booth growled.

"Even a pseudo-science like psychiatry has _some_ standards," agreed Brennan.

"What even brought this on?" asked Sweets. His voice took on a plaintive whine. "I thought that we were getting along."

"He really isn't as bright as he thinks he is," said Brennan to Booth.

"Maybe he's just forgetful," said Booth, sliding into his good-cop persona. "Maybe he _forgot_ that he told me that my feelings for you were a side effect of the brain surgery, not something real that you could, you know, _write a fucking book about!_ "

"Maybe he also forgot that two years ago, I told him to stop treating us like lab rats," Bones mock-mused.

"That's why you didn't hit him then, like you did me," volunteered Booth.

"Exactly," Bones agreed.

"See?" Booth asked Sweets. "I can figure things out. I should work for a place with _investigation_ in the name."

"He made up that story about thinking I could handle your death, thinking I could compartmentalize. That wasn't it, though, was it, Dr. Sweets? You admitted at the time that you were really doing an experiment to see how much I suffered when I thought that I was never going to see him again because he died protecting me." She turned to Booth and ran one hand down his face, as if reassuring herself that he was really there. Her eyes locked on his, and he knew that her next words were going to go straight to his soul. "I couldn't compartmentalize it. You're in all of my compartments. I'm sorry I hit you, I'm sorry about the thing in your bathroom, and mostly I'm sorry that I didn't tell you about what he was doing. If you'd known, maybe you wouldn't have trusted him this time."

Then she did something that she hardly ever did.

She started to cry.

The list of things that Booth was willing to do to keep his Bones from being distressed enough to cry was endless. He certainly didn't want her crying over the time Sweets had mindfucked her. It was even worse if she was crying because Sweets had mindfucked _him_. "You're not the one who needs to apologize, Bones," he murmured, grabbing his handkerchief to brush the tears off of her cheeks.

He'd done that before in this very office, when Gordon Gordon had somehow convinced Bones that she needed to open a vein to help out the wounded little bunny-duck Sweets. Booth himself had followed suit, had talked about shit he had no desire to talk about _ever_ , because he wasn't going to leave Bones alone in her misery.

They'd be paying Gordon Gordon a visit. Oh yes, they would.

But first, the issue at hand.

"Why didn't you tell me then?"

She hadn't quite stopped crying. "I told Sweets that if you knew, you'd beat him up. I thought that that he wouldn't do it again if he had that hanging over his head. You know how he's always going on about your violent childhood."

Booth nodded. He kissed Bones on the cheek, gave her shoulder a squeeze, and stepped away from her and toward Sweets.

"Did you hear that, Sweets? My partner told you that if I found out what you did to her, I'd beat you up. I'd hate to make a liar out of my partner, especially after you made her cry. And you know all about how I just can't help myself after that violent childhood."

He took a quick stock of their surroundings. He, Bones, and Sweets were alone.

Then he punched Sweets in the stomach.

Sweets fell to the floor with a tortured groan as the air escaped his lungs.

"Punches to the gut hurt more than punches to the face a lot of times," Booth told Bones. "Plus they don't leave an obvious mark."

"I don't think he was going to file a complaint about us with the FBI, anyway," said Bones. "If anyone is going to do that, it's going to be us."

"You did already try giving him an unofficial second chance," said Booth. The last thing he wanted to do was file a formal complaint that made him sound like a lovestruck lunatic who didn't trust his own instincts. But he could tell Bones that when they were alone.

She had dried her tears. "What if it's Angela next time?" she asked. "Or Dr. Saroyan? Or Dr. Hodgins? What about Mr. Bray and Mr. Nigel-Murray? They're my interns. I'm obligated to make certain that they have a safe learning environment." Her eyes flashed dangerously. "What about Miss Wick? She considers me to be her idol. Her mentor. How could I let her remain involved with a man who would-"

"Please, I'm begging you, just leave Daisy out of this," said Sweets.

"Sucks to think you might lose someone you love, doesn't it?" said Booth amicably.

"Maybe she won't be mad at you forever," suggested Bones. "Maybe it will only be six months. Like the six months you cost us."

"I didn't cost you six months," snapped Sweets, not begging any longer. He struggled to his feet, bracing himself on a chair for support and panting with exertion. The kid really had no idea how to take a punch or two. "You wouldn't have just gotten together and lived happily ever after if I'd let him tell you that he loved you then."

"Perhaps," said Bones. "Or perhaps we would have eloped that night. Perhaps we would have been married by an Elvis impersonator on top of a ferris wheel. The possibilities are endless, and therefore not worth debating. You're correct in that."

"A broken clock is right twice a day, huh, Sweets?" asked Booth. "Since we don't want to wait around for twelve hours, we'll be going now. We'll let you know when we've decided what to do with you. Don't call us, we'll call you."

He draped his arm around Bones' shoulders and ushered her out the door. At the last moment, Bones turned around. "Dr. Sweets?" she asked.

"Yes, Dr. Brennan?" he returned, braver now that they were leaving.

"Remember that time that you testified at my father's trial that I'm capable of rationalizing anything, including murder?"

She didn't wait for an answer. She let Booth guide her down the hall, and then to his car. The avenging angel (the description _fit_ even if she wouldn't appreciate him saying it out loud) had been replaced by someone who seemed overwhelmed and almost fragile. He loved her either way.

"Where are we going?" she asked. "We don't have a case."

"We're taking a very early lunch."

"We can walk to all of the places that we usually go to lunch."

"It's not about food, Bones. It's about you and me having a conversation where no one can interrupt us."

"We're going to talk about what to do with Sweets?"

"Yeah, that. But first we're going to talk about us. You and me. Sweets doesn't get to be more important than that."

"Definitely not."

He still couldn't wrap his mind around what, exactly, she thought of his confession of love. She'd told Sweets that they would have been together for six months by now absent his interference, and she didn't usually say things just for effect, but today was a very unusual day. She'd almost certainly been joking about the ferris wheel and the Elvis impersonator, after all. "It's not going to be a problem?" he asked at last. "Me being in love with you."

They had stopped for a red light. She unbuckled her seatbelt and leaned across the seat to kiss him on the lips. The kiss was neither deep nor demanding, but it held great promise of both. "No. That's not going to be a problem."

He laughed. "I'm on a roll," he said in disbelief. "Last night I found out that my brain wasn't broken after all, and today I got a kiss from the most beautiful forensic anthropologist on the east coast."

She rolled her eyes. She knew that he knew that there weren't many forensic anthropologists to choose from on the east coast- and that the rest were men, unless they wanted to count the half-trained Daisy Wick. "You'd get more than a kiss if you weren't driving," she said. "Especially since you aren't wearing a seatbelt and some of the other things that we can do really wouldn't be safe."

"I think we can find a better place than the car," he conceded. His abdomen tensed at the thought.

"If you're sure," she said.

"Yes, I'm sure that the first time will be in a bedroom, not in a car like a couple of horny teenagers," he told her.

"No," she said, and suddenly she wasn't so playful. "If you're still sure that you want us to be something more than professional partners."

"Bones, Sweets did enough telling me that I don't know what I want. You don't need to start, too."

"Sweets might not have had a chance to gaslight you if I'd been honest with you two years ago."

"You aren't still thinking about that!" He looked at her worried face. Evidently, that was exactly what she was thinking about. "You don't know what would have happened if you'd told me any more than you know whether we would have gotten married on a ferris wheel six months ago if I'd told you that I was in love with you."

"One of those scenarios is more likely than the other."

"You're right. Call the lab and ask where the nearest ferris wheel is, and we'll see what happens."

She didn't laugh, but she smiled, and that was good enough. "If you hadn't told me what Sweets did, and you'd just told me that you wanted us to become romantically involved, I would have said no."

Since he had considered taking that very route several hours before, he did not care for this revelation. "Why?"

"I would have taken that manuscript more seriously. You know I don't like psychology, but it would have been hard to ignore those things he wrote about how closed off and afraid of love I am. I wouldn't want to inflict that on you."

"No one's inflicting anything."

"But if you're a white knight, then you'd try to fix me even though there's no benefit to you."

"And if Sweets were right about me being unable to control my temper because my father is a bastard, and you being able to use logic to justify murder, then he would be lying dead in his office instead of just nursing a sore jaw and a sore gut."

"Wouldn't we have taken him somewhere else to kill him, though?" she wondered. "His office would be a bad place to do it."

"We could get away with it no matter where we did it."

She smiled. "That's true."

"But we aren't going to kill anyone. No murder, no killing, no dying of any kind."

Her smile got even broader. "Have you ever heard the French expression _la petite mort_? It literally means _the little death_ , but now it's almost exclusively used to refer to orgasms."

"That's it." Booth made a u-turn, ignoring the honking from the driver he cut off, and headed toward his apartment. "If we have time to eat during our early lunch, which I doubt, we will be eating the leftover pizza in my refrigerator."

He heard no objection to his plan. As he turned onto his street, her hand came to rest on his upper thigh and he was glad that he didn't have much further to drive.

First, he was going to _la petite mort_ his Bones like she'd never been _la petite mort_ ed before.

Then they were going to eat leftover pizza and drink beer. (They would do the fancy candlelit dinner later in the week.)

And then, maybe, they would consider the best way to clip the little duckling's wings so he wouldn't be able to hurt anyone else. The kid was into singing and playing the piano. Perhaps he could be persuaded to give up psychiatry and commit himself to a musical career.

As soon as they jumped out of the car, Bones had her hands under his jacket and he had his lips on her neck.

It would be a long time before he would be able to think straight again, he realized blearily when Bones accidentally-on-purpose rolled her hips against his groin.

But he trusted his mind, and he trusted his Bones, and that left him with complete faith that everything else would fall into place.

He noticed the table he had nearly knocked over that morning and shoved it back where it belonged as Bones dragged him into his bedroom.

 **The End**


	3. The Dwarf in the Dirt Crackfic

_Ways It Didn't Happen: The Dwarf in the Dirt, Season 5_

Disclaimer: _I own nothing related to Bones and no money is being made from this work of fan fiction._

Note/Spoilers: _Everything through early season 5 is fair game; everything after will be gleefully ignored. This occurs prior to the 100th episode. Brennan's attitude in that episode was a complete shock to me as I didn't expect her to be that fearful and insecure at all… so this may feel a bit out of character and crack-ficcy._

* * *

It wasn't that Brennan intended to eavesdrop.

Not that there was any expectation of privacy in a public place like a diner, so if she _had_ intended to eavesdrop, Sweets and Gordon could not rationally place the blame on anyone but themselves.

Not that she expected rationality out of a pair of psychiatrists, of all people. If they had been capable of rational thought, they would not have drifted toward the ill-named soft sciences that had nothing to do with science at all.

And so to be precise, she hadn't been eavesdropping at all. She had merely overheard, and had failed to interrupt and ask for clarification because she had been in a hurry to get back to the lab and make certain that the work there was under control while she was in the field with Booth watching what was apparently known as midget wrestling.

Even _she_ knew that that name was offensive as well as inaccurate.

The important issue, though, wasn't whether she'd been eavesdropping or whether that ought to have been socially acceptable. The important issue was what she had overheard.

" _I believe that as a reaction to the childhood traumas of abuse and abandonment, Dr Brennan utilizes her intellect to armor herself from intense levels of emotion, like love,"_ Sweets said with his usual oversimplified and incorrect psychobabble.

" _And Booth?"_ prompted Gordon.

" _Well, subconsciously, he's sensitive to her vulnerability. He knows that acting upon his feelings for her would amount to a kind of assault,"_ pontificated Sweets.

Brennan's body tightened as she waited for Gordon to explain to Sweets that he simply couldn't be correct.

" _I couldn't agree with you more,"_ said Gordon.

" _So Booth not shooting straight is simply, what, a manifestation of his phallic frustration?"_ asked Sweets.

" _Yeah, he quite literally can't bring his weapon to bear,"_ Gordon confirmed.

And that was when Brennan hastened out of the diner.

For the next hour, she mentally sorted out the potential courses of action. There were variations, of course, but there were only two major options. The first was to do nothing, and the second was to do something.

Doing nothing was appealing, and there was certainly a high probability that that would be the more efficient choice. After all, what did psychiatry know about her, or about Booth?

Doing something, though, was the more sensible scientific choice. You could not prove a hypothesis incorrect if you never tested it.

And if there was even the slightest chance that Gordon and Sweets were correct…

She scoffed. Gordon and Sweets were not correct.

But if they were…

If they were correct, Booth's return to his usual shooting form was in her hands.

And in assorted other parts of her body.

And there was nothing that she wouldn't do for Booth.

* * *

Booth didn't seem to think that there was anything out of the ordinary when she asked him to stop at her apartment on the way back to the Jeffersonian from the Gold Exchange that had been robbed by their victim. He obligingly pointed the SUV in the requested direction without any question as to why. That was just as well. She'd prepared a story about not being sure she hadn't left a file at home that morning, but she was a terrible liar- one of many reasons that she generally didn't bother with lies.

Except for Booth.

Anything for him.

Once upstairs, she ducked into her bedroom and sought out the lingerie she had bought, at Angela's insistence, when they had last gone shopping together. She hadn't worn it before, and the idea that Booth would be the one to enjoy it (and he _would_ enjoy it) gave her more pleasure than she would have anticipated. There was a warm feeling of rightness about it all.

She smiled to herself. This would work. Booth would be fixed. She would take care of him the way he'd always taken care of her, and she'd have a very nice time while she did it.

Her heart pounded with anticipation as she opened her bedroom door, then tightened with sympathy when she saw Booth seated awkwardly on her couch.

Booth had never looked uncomfortable or out of place in her home. The very first time he had come here, he had nonchalantly rummaged through her music collection and, without invitation, played Foreigner's _Hot Blooded_ on full blast.

Now he looked lost.

There was no time to dwell on that, though. She needed to get the blood flowing away from his brain before he had a chance to worry or ask what she was doing.

It took her approximately three seconds to cross the room and straddle him. He looked up just in time for her to capture his lips with hers and kiss him deeply. He opened his mouth almost immediately and took over control of the kiss.

She let him. He was good at it. She'd known that already, but she had put it out of her mind.

When his hands began to roam her back and tease at the edge of the translucent blue lace of the bustier, she allowed herself to set the plan aside and concentrate on the sensations. If Booth was going to do this with no questions asked, so much the better.

Of course Booth wasn't going to do this with no questions asked.

She let out an involuntary disconsolate groan when he abruptly broke off the kiss and grabbed her by her hips to keep her from scooting forward and grinding herself against him.

"What the hell are you doing, Bones?"

"If you let me keep doing it, you'll figure it out eventually," she offered.

"Do not," he said firmly, "try to be funny. Is that what this is? A joke?"

She shook her head, feeling her hair brush her cheeks. "No. Not a joke."

He paled almost imperceptibly. "This isn't something we do, is it? Something I forgot because of the brain surgery? Like the belt buckle or the clown or how to fix a pipe or apparently how to shoot-"

"No," she rushed to assure him. "No, we haven't done this before. Well, we kissed once at Christmas a few years ago because Caroline-"

"That, I remember."

"It wasn't a bad kiss."

"So you woke up this morning and decided to lure me to your apartment under false pretenses for a repeat performance two years after the fact?"

"No. I didn't plan it until I overheard..." She paused to reconsider. This was going badly. She absolutely did not want to lie to him, but she couldn't think of any way to explain her plan that he was going to like.

"You overheard _what_?" he asked in a low, dangerous voice that didn't scare her at all as she sat astride his legs, ninety percent naked and with the taste of his tongue burning her mouth.

"I'll tell you later," she promised. "Now let's… if you want to. You kissed me back like you wanted to." She flicked her eyes to his crotch and saw the telltale tenting there. She met his eyes again. "I think it could help. I think you'd feel better. You'd be less stressed."

"That is not a good reason to have sex."

"On the contrary, feeling good is one of the best reasons to have sex."

"With the right person, sure."

"Who is the right person?" she challenged. "I don't think you've had any life other than work or Parker over a year. I'm not sure you've had sex since you stopped sleeping with Cam, and you definitely haven't had a real relationship since Tessa. And we like each other more than you and Tessa liked each other."

"You still need to tell me why this is happening now," he said stubbornly.

She found herself pleased that he hadn't argued about Tessa.

His eyes stayed locked on hers, ready to wait her out.

She sighed and leaned back just the tiniest bit further. "I overheard Sweets and Gordon speculating that your problems with your aim are really because you love me and you're afraid of hurting me."

His hands tightened on her hips. "Since when do you put any stock in psychology?"

"I don't. But if there was any chance it was true, I couldn't let you suffer when there was something I could do to help. Even if everything they said about me was stupid." She put her hands on his shoulders, partnerly instead of seductive. "I would do anything for you, Booth."

"That's nice," he said, and she didn't like his sarcastic tone at all. "But I do not want a pity fuck." He gave her hips one more shove in the wrong direction- not hard enough to make her fall, but hard enough to slide her off of his lap so that he could stand up.

"It wasn't a pity fuck!" she objected. "I was enjoying myself until you stopped!"

There was the tiniest quirk at one corner of his mouth, almost as if he had started to smile and stopped himself. It gave her hope.

"I do _not_ think you need to be pitied," she continued. "I told you. I think that you need to practice. Or else that you're just getting old."

"Thank you," he said, with what she assumed was more sarcasm even though he seemed less angry than he had been an instant before.

"Men's physical prowess tends to decline after age thirty-five," she reminded him automatically. "Attractiveness doesn't, though. You're still more physically attractive than…" she trailed off. "Almost anyone," she completed lamely.

Booth moved closer to Brennan. She wasn't quite sure what he meant to do, but he was close enough that she could feel that he was still aroused. That was only fair. So was she. "More attractive than almost anyone," he repeated. "Very nice of you to say, Bones."

"It's nicer than anything you've said to me," she pointed out, making sure that she looked at his eyes and not at his groin. "I was so happy when I put this on. Angela said I had to buy it because it's the same color as my eyes even though I didn't have anyone I wanted to wear it with. Then I realized that I wanted it to be for you, and you didn't even notice it. I know I was in too much of a hurry to put on the garter belt, but-"

"There's a garter belt?" he asked, and the gravely strain of his voice sent another rush of warmth through her.

"Yes," she said. "I thought it would be a waste of time, if you were just going to throw whatever I was wearing on the floor anyway, but you aren't like other men."

"You told our witness this morning that you like good boys," Booth pointed out.

"Good boys are allowed to like sex." The ones she'd known certainly had. "Does that bother you?" she asked. "That I've had sex with a certain number of men?" He had always been very uptight at the mere mention of that aspect of her life.

"What? No, of course not, Bones. You're an adult. So am I."

"But you haven't had sex since you had brain surgery, and maybe you're concerned that you won't be able to-"

" _Do not put that into the universe!"_ he snapped, unreasonably defensive while his erection was still bumping against her.

"I love you more than I loved any of them," she said.

It wasn't the first time she'd said it. " _I love you in an atta-boy way,"_ she'd told him months before, following his lead. Still, it had the effect that nothing else had had. In one smooth, quick motion, Booth pulled her into his arms, carried her into her bedroom, and threw her onto her bed.

He climbed on top of her and kissed her deeply. She gasped for air as he broke away and smiled down at her. "You're beautiful, Bones. Always," he whispered.

The bustier and the matching panties hit the floor with a distinct lack of ceremony.

* * *

" _Booth_!"

Contrary to what Booth probably suspected, Brennan didn't do a lot of deep thinking during sex. But when she heard herself calling his name through a haze of sensation, a shiver of recognition ran down her spine along with the more pleasant shivers.

Usually when she screamed his name, she was screaming from fear that he was about to die and that she was about to lose him.

It was only now, when she called his name as her body spasmed around his, that she fully appreciated why that fear ran so deep.

For all that her original plan had been to seduce Booth without his knowing why, she hadn't told a word of lie to him. Any lying had been done to herself.

 _I love you._

She could have left it at that.

There were no conditions or qualifiers or atta-boys needed.

She loved him, and the thought struck her with such a terrifying clarity that her whole body froze, just for a second.

Booth's eyes, dark and crazed with desire and need and desperation, still flickered to hers to confirm that she was all right, that the tensing was the end of an orgasm and nothing more.

She nodded, not trusting her voice to assure him that he should let go. A heartbeat later, he did.

* * *

She watched him again, just as she had when they'd first come into the apartment.

No, just as she had since he'd opened his eyes after his brain surgery.

The phone held to the opposite ear.

The coffee in his left hand instead of his right.

The missing belt buckle.

The plain socks.

The clown that hadn't upset him.

Leading with his right foot instead of his left when he climbed a flight of stairs.

Looking anything but comfortable in her home.

And now lying naked in her bed, a dazed expression on his face. His face that she loved.

He turned his head and noticed her watching him. "Can I touch you?" she asked.

He exploded into laughter, and that sounded like the old carefree Booth and not this new, oddly vulnerable one. "I think it's a little late for you to ask me that, Bones."

She didn't want to say that that had been one of Michael's quirks. He didn't like to be touched just after an orgasm; he'd needed a moment for his nervous system to settle.

She didn't want to say that the last time she'd felt this shy in bed with a man, she'd only just barely left her virginity behind.

She didn't want to say that then, she had felt like she was making a rational step in her evolution as a human being; now, she was afraid that she had destroyed what had become a wonderful life.

"C'mere."

Before she knew it, Booth had tucked her under his arm, close against his side. He did the same thing sometimes when they were walking and talking, fully clothed of course, on the grounds of the Jeffersonian. It meant absolute safety and contentment, she found, whether they were clothed or not.

"Good," said Booth, as if he knew exactly when her panic had subsided.

"It was good," she agreed.

Again, he laughed in the old carefree way. "And you've got jokes, too." He smoothed her hair and kissed her forehead.

She twisted her neck to look at him. "Now what?" she asked, since he once again seemed to have all the answers.

"In the short term, I think we should just stay here all day."

"We have a murder to solve."

Booth shrugged dismissively against her. There was something wonderfully intimate about it. "No, I solved the murder."

She sat up in surprise, then regretted the loss of contact and lay down again. "Enlighten me."

"It was the brother. Derek told us that he and Bryce weren't close, but Bryce was calling Derek's number from prison. His cellmate said that his woman on the outside had just broken things off, but he wasn't calling a woman. He was calling the brother he barely spoke to. Except it wasn't his brother."

The logic struck Brennan hard. "It was his brother's wife."

"One brother get outs of prison and robs the Gold Exchange to impress her. The other brother kills him. When a man can't have the woman he loves, he gets a little bit crazy."

"Do you love me?" she asked. She knew that every horrible magazine in every doctor's office warned against asking that question, but she'd never put much stock in those. They were, after all, based in psychology.

"I do, Bones," and it sounded less like confirmation and more like a wedding vow.

"I love you, too," she returned. "And if I couldn't have you, I would get a little bit crazy." He chuckled against her, and for the third time that day, she remarked inwardly that she had missed his laughter. "Only a little bit," she said, more to reassure herself than him. "When I was fifteen and my parents and Russ left, I didn't have anyone. I finished high school, and college, and graduate school, and I wrote a book and was certified in martial arts and traveled to every continent and became the preeminent forensic anthropologist in the world. If you left, I'd still have my career, and Angela, and-"

"I'm not going to leave," he interrupted harshly.

"You don't know that."

"I do," he said, and she wished he would stop using that phrase. Just because she loved him didn't mean that she was ready to start thinking about marriage, no matter how much he believed in it. He'd probably want them to be married by a priest in a church, too, and she just wasn't sure that she could keep a straight face for that.

"If you were confident that this- that _love-_ would work between us, why didn't you make the first move?"

"Bringing someone to your apartment and then taking off all of your clothes doesn't work as well when you're a man. It's creepy."

"You didn't kiss me. You didn't tell me you loved me," she pushed.

"I started to. The night with the- with the atta-girl. When I told you I loved you in an atta-girl way. I was going to tell you that I was in love with you, and then the clown…" The lines of frustration returned to his face. "I didn't remember how I felt about clowns. I didn't think I should trust how I felt about you. And yes, it made me a little crazy."

"So it wasn't that you were afraid of hurting me? Like Gordon and Sweets said?"

"Of course I was afraid of hurting you. I didn't want to tell you I loved you if I wasn't sure I meant it. That's cruel, and I don't ever want to be cruel to you."

"If that changes, I'm not going to fall apart. I don't know where Gordon and Sweets got the idea that I'm too fragile to handle losing a romantic partner when I survived losing absolutely everything when I was fifteen years old. So if you aren't sure-"

"I am," he said firmly. "Everything makes sense now. The case, my life, the marksmanship certification." He wound his fingers through hers and squeezed her hand. "Will you come with me to the shooting range tomorrow morning?"

"As your partner or as your date?"

"As my partner. I have somewhere better to take you as my date."

* * *

Derek DaFonte confessed to the murder of his brother with no protest and a cool "you know why" in his wife's direction.

Brennan still wasn't sure that marriage was ever a great idea.

But she was sure that she was in awe of Booth's skill as an FBI agent.

* * *

She knew that Booth was a traditionalist who would want to take her to a nice restaurant to celebrate the events of the day. She was a bit surprised, though, that the restaurant in question was the one belonging to Gordon Gordon Wyatt.

"Are you going to tell him?" Brennan asked. "Tell him what happened between us? Tell him I listened to him and Sweets and that their theory was… well, wrong, but not completely wrong?"

"I won't tell him anything that you don't want me to tell him."

"I don't want you to lie if he asks a direct question," Brennan decided. "But it feels like the whole world has been waiting for something to happen between us. Angela started as soon as we started working together regularly, and she got everyone else on board. I don't want it to be theirs yet. I want it to be ours. Just for a little while."

"You know a little while is all we're going to get. If I were still a betting man, I'd put the over-under at two days."

He wasn't wrong. Angela would probably guess as soon as they came face to face.

Gordon Gordon ushered them to the chef's table in the kitchen. As much as it was supposed to be an honor, Brennan didn't care for the noise or the heat or the amuse-bouche that Gordon Gordon described as looking like sperm on corn smut.

"Just go with it," said Booth, noticing her displeasure.

"Anything for you," she promised, and if Gordon noticed the stupid smile that spread over Booth's face from where he stood lecturing the sauce chef on the soup of the day, he didn't comment.

Gordon did comment that Booth seemed suddenly less concerned about his recertification. Booth volunteered that he was thinking more clearly now.

The main course was actually good.

* * *

They didn't go home together that night. Booth suggested it repeatedly; Brennan was of the opinion that she was not going to be responsible for his failing to get a full night's sleep before his recertification.

She'd made no guarantees about her own plans to sleep, however. She stayed awake all night alternately working and remembering what Booth had looked like stretched out in her bed as if he belonged there.

* * *

As they'd agreed, they greeted each other as partners the next morning at the shooting range. She gave him a thumbs up as he happily examined his perfect targets.

"Excellent, Agent Booth," said the range master needlessly.

"Well done, partner," she said when they left the range.

He put his arm around her and tucked her into his side. She was forcibly reminded of the afternoon before and tried hard to remember that Booth had been touching her like this in public for years.

Her body didn't want to remember the years of friendship and partnership. Her body wanted to kiss him and kiss him and admit that his shooting skill was, somehow, a turn-on. Her body wanted to take a page out of Hodgins and Angela's book and drag Booth into the antiquities room. (She would avoid the cameras, as Angela and Hodgins had not managed to do. She didn't need that lecture from Cam.)

Booth pulled Brennan into a stairwell, glanced around, and pushed her up against the wall to kiss her.

"Love you," he said.

She decided not to worry about whether someone might be eavesdropping.

After all, eavesdropping could lead to some very good things.

 **The End**

* * *

 _Other Note:_ _Special thank you to the wonderful reviewer Bones2014 for reassuring me that I can write as many variations on season 5 as I'd like. :) Though with this out of the way, the fragments currently existing in my Bones file are season 3 (faked death), season 4 (pseudo-amnesia), and indeterminate (more Gravedigger)._


	4. Teen Fic 1

**The Teen Fic**

Author's Note: _Teen fics, like crackfics, are not my thing. But here we are. I mean, those old pictures of Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz that the show used last episode were basically like an order, right?_

 _I'm sticking with Booth as having ruined his shoulder playing basketball rather than football, though. That's been in my head for too long for me to adjust now. (I always liked "The Player Under Pressure.") So since this is obviously as AU as AU can be anyway..._

* * *

Tempe bowed her head as she braided her hair in two French pigtails. A glance in the mirror told her that she had done the job well, not that she cared about style or fashion. Style and fashion were a complete waste of time, but tying her hair back for a day spent planting flowers in the park was a practical necessity.

A horn honked in front of her foster parents' house and she rushed for the front door.

"Don't make them wait, Temperance," her foster mother scolded severely. "I don't want that honking to wake up the neighborhood on a Saturday morning.

Tempe didn't answer. There was nothing to say; it wasn't as if she hadn't been ready on time, or she hadn't been watching for the car. The driver had just honked before she could have done anything to stop it.

As she opened the back door of the car, she saw that the driver was Mrs. Albertson, one of the English teachers at the high school. Tempe had never been in Mrs. Albertson's class, but Russ had liked her.

It was odd to think that Russ had ever known any of these people. It was odd to think that Russ had ever existed.

And so she halted that train of thought. It was useless. Only the future mattered, and in her future she would never see, speak to, or think about Russ, much less her parents.

"Your hair looks pretty, Tempe," chirped Cora, who was sitting in the front seat. "I can never get that kind of braid right." Debbie, who was in the backseat, snickered, and Tempe knew that this had been some kind of a dare- compliment Morticia, extra points if you do it in front of a teacher. Tempe was bad at navigating the school's complicated social structure, but even she knew that much. So she didn't say anything back to Cora.

"Cora complimented you, Tempe," said Mrs. Albertson. "Say 'thank you.'"

"Thank you," said Tempe.

Then they left her alone as she stared out the window on the way to the park. Five days of forced close proximity with the likes of Cora and Debbie was enough; she wouldn't have chosen to spend her Saturday fulfilling the school's community service requirement if she had had any kind of choice. But then, she didn't want to spend an uninterrupted weekend with her foster parents, either. And so she looked out the window and readied herself to learn as much as possible. The volunteer groups from all of the participating schools would be under the direction of botanists employed by the city. Perhaps the botanist would have something worthwhile to say. Botany wasn't her subject of choice, but at least it was useful. She could respect a botanist.

She couldn't respect a teacher who ordered her to thank her classmate for insulting her.

* * *

Booth looked around the park with interest. He agreed with his teammates that it was ridiculous to insist that they take part in a community service day when they had come to Chicago to play in an exhibition tournament. Still, he had rarely spent a moment of his life outside of Pennsylvania. Most of the travel had been for basketball, and most of those trips had been spent in gyms that looked much like any other gym. It was nice to see something new- even if that something was a park that looked much like any other park.

After a few moments, then, he joined his teammates in watching the cluster of teenage girls that were being instructed in the ways of planting an ornamental fern. A few of the girls were paying attention to the instructions. The rest were looking right back at Booth and his teammates.

Coach McKenna clapped his hands for attention, and he got it instantly. He was a good coach, but to a man Booth and his teammates knew that there would be consequences for anything less than prompt obedience. In the gym, the consequences took the form of endless laps. Here, the consequences might well involve the pile of manure that Booth had smelled when they'd walked past the playground and the entrance to the hiking trail.

"Those girls you're flirting with," Coach growled in a low voice. "It damn well better only be flirting. No touching. No teasing. Don't even look at them for too long. They are in high school. The older ones are sixteen and some of them are only fifteen. Not one of them is over the age of consent. Not one of them is old enough to vote or buy a beer or serve in the military. Most of them are not old enough to drive. Think of them all as your little sisters and treat them accordingly. Understood?"

"Yes, sir," they answered with military precision. Booth knew about military precision. He came from a military family, just as Coach had. It was one of the reasons that they got along so well.

Not that that was going to be any good to Booth when his shoulder gave out.

His shoulder throbbed unpleasantly at the thought. He might make it through college but everything beyond that was meaninglessness piled on top of directionlessness. He had always been an athlete, a jock, a star. He didn't know how to be anything else.

"Over my objection and good judgment, you are going to be working with those girls," continued Coach. The players allowed themselves a small, quiet whoop of laughter. "You will dig holes for them and they will plant their seeds in those holes." The threat in Coach's voice left them all very, very quiet. "The first one of you who so much as thinks that that sounds backwards will be off the team."

Booth sensed a certain deflation in the young men around him, as if Coach had ruined their fun by making the dirty joke himself.

That didn't stop them from enjoying the adoring looks of the girls as they collected their spades and spread out across the garden to dig in the places marked by the botanist in charge. (Who had known that there was such a thing as a botanist-in-charge?) A little hero worship was nice, and some of the girls were really very pretty, especially when they blinked their impossibly round eyes and whispered how amazing it was to have real live college basketball players helping them out on their community service day.

One of the girls- Booth thought her name was Katie- broke the no-touching rule when he headed toward the far edge of the garden. "Don't go too close to Morticia," she said urgently.

"Yeah, we don't need Morticia's help," chimed in Katie's friend. "Let her go collect dead animals or something."

From where Booth stood squinting in the sunlight, he didn't think that the girl in question looked particularly goth. She wasn't dressed in black; if she was wearing makeup at all, it wasn't very much.

He hesitated. He didn't want to forsake the attentions of earnest Katie and her giggling friend.

He also didn't want to be a grown up man of twenty who let a couple of teenage girls ensnare him in their systematic isolation and name-calling of their classmate. He'd made a few missteps like that when he'd been in high school himself. He wasn't going to make that mistake here, where the long term consequences were zero. He was never going to see any of these girls again, and his teammates didn't know or care who the tenth-grade outcast happened to be.

"We need everyone's help to get out of here as soon as possible," he told the two girls. "I've got better things to do with my day than plant a garden, and I bet you ladies do, too."

Katie and her friend sighed romantically. Booth balanced on the narrow line between being flattered and thinking they looked ridiculous. "Be careful," said one.

"Hope you have a wooden stake and some holy water," said the other.

* * *

Tempe adjourned to the far corner of the garden with the intention of appropriating her own spade and doing the work herself instead of "in teams" as the botanist had instructed. Words like "teams" and "partners" turned her stomach just a bit and there was nothing she could do about it. More importantly, she didn't like the sexism inherent in telling the boys to handle the spades and the girls to follow them around doing the actual planting. What was next? Telling girls that they shouldn't study math and science, or perhaps that they shouldn't have careers at all?

Then one of the boys and his spade appeared in her corner of the garden.

No, not one of the boys.

He was an adult man, at least five years older than she was. He was also, objectively speaking, the best looking human being she had ever seen in real life.

In her experience, the most attractive human beings were generally the nastiest, and that was all the more true if they were elite athletes. Andy Fluger, the varsity lacrosse captain, had proven that back before Christmas.

She wasn't going to trust this one even though he smiled and held out his gloved hand and said that his name was Booth.

But she did shake his hand and tell him that her name was Tempe.

"Like Arizona?" he asked with a lopsided smile that tweaked her hormones and forced her to remind herself that her brain was stronger than a chemical reaction.

"Like Temperance," she corrected.

More and more often, people called her Temperance. Her foster parents did. She liked it that way. They weren't her parents; they shouldn't call her by the nickname her parents had given her.

And most people at school just called her Morticia. That had started all of a sudden when her parents and Russ had left. The last lingering vestiges of the protective status she'd received as popular Russ Brennan's younger sister had vanished as surely as her family itself had.

"That's one of the six human strengths in positive psychology," said Booth. "Temperance. You were the answer to my psych midterm."

There was one more reason to dislike him. Out of all the things he could study in college, he had chosen something ridiculous like _psychology_.

At least he seemed willing to do his job. He turned quickly to the row of ferns and began digging a hole for each with impressively little effort.

If Tempe watched the way his shoulders and legs moved, or the way his hands gripped the spade, it was only because she had an interest in kinesiology and he was a good subject to study.

"Oh!" he exclaimed when he reached the sixth fern.

"Did you hit a sprinkler line?" she asked anxiously. "They said to report it right away if that happens."

"I don't think so." He was kneeling in the dirt, and, unable to restrain her curiosity, she knelt beside him so that she could look too. His spade had struck something that was long and smooth and white like the watering system, but it wasn't quite smooth enough or white enough.

She ran her gloved hand along the length of their discovery. "I think it's a bone," she said. "See if you can get the rest of it out. But don't break it."

"We're supposed to be planting ferns, not excavating dinosaurs," he objected.

She glowered. "If there were dinosaur bones here, someone would have found them when they first landscaped the park."

"But still," he wheedled. "Wouldn't it be cool to find a T-Rex?"

"They mostly just find Tully Monsters in Illinois. Illinois would have been under an ocean back then." She'd known that since toddlerhood, when her father had first started taking her to the science museum. Not that she was going to think about her father ever again.

"Tully Monsters?" His lip quirked in that half-smile again. "You're making that up."

"Consider studying something more useful than psychology," she advised him.

"If you paid a little attention to psychology, you might not have such a hard time with your classmates," he shot back.

"I have more important things to do than worry about what other people think of me." Like surviving the next two years and getting herself to college once she aged out of the foster care system.

"Don't you get lonely?" he pushed.

Somehow the question from a stranger affected her more than all of the taunts she'd received from her classmates. His handsome face was an inch from hers and she would have been able to handle all of it if she could have gone home to her parents and Russ.

But she no longer had a home or a family or a safe place.

Of course she was lonely.

But she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of crying.

"Oh, hey, I didn't mean to upset you," he said hastily. "Look, let's get that bone out and see what it is, all right?"

* * *

Booth spent half an hour carefully removing bones from a hole in a garden in a park somewhere in Illinois.

It was one of the more disgusting things he had ever done, and it was definitely not how he had planned to spend the day before an important basketball game.

But it was infinitely preferable to making a teenage girl cry by asking her if she was lonely. Thankfully, she hadn't quite gotten to the point of tears, but her face had crumbled just enough to let him know that he'd struck harder than he'd meant to. He hadn't meant to strike at all; he'd just wanted to encourage her to be a little more… well, like a girl. It would have made her life easier.

She didn't have to be an outcast. No one that pretty had to be an outcast.

It wasn't Booth's business, though, to find out why this girl, this Tempe, was miserable. It was his business to dig holes and get himself and his team out of the community service requirement in time for dinner and practice.

"It's a dog, I think," she said, studying the bones with real interest. "Someone buried his pet here."

"So it's a pet cemetery?" Booth asked with mock-concern

"No," she said blankly. "It's a garden where someone happened to bury a pet."

"I mean, like, Stephen King?" Booth pushed. "Horror movies?"

She shook her head. "I like _The Mummy._ The 1932 version, but I prefer Chaney's mummy to Karloff's."

He didn't know who the person in front of him was, but he knew that, all appearances to the contrary, she wasn't a fifteen-year-old girl.

He was saved from further thought when one of the botanists rushed over to them and swept the skeleton away amidst many apologies and inquiries as to whether they were all right.

"We're fine," said Booth.

"The bones were more interesting than the ferns," his partner complained.

"Bones, huh?" Booth mused. "No movies made in your lifetime, no giggling with the other girls, no psychology, no plants, just bones. That's what does it for you."

"Yes," she said with so little guile that he had to appreciate it. Pretty and smart, if weird as hell. He could roll with that, and he did as they finished their section of the garden.

The high school teacher called her students together for lunch almost as soon as the last fern was planted, and Coach sent his players to join the girls with an extra admonishment to behave themselves and to consider looking at their homework before the afternoon session. By "consider," he meant that he had personally removed their books from the bus and brought them to the shady benches at the edge of the garden.

With remarkable team unity, they groaned. Coach was making sure that their road trip was nothing like a vacation.

Booth evaluated the circle of girls sitting on the grass. His partner was nowhere to be seen. At last, he noticed that she'd drifted away to the shady benches near the stack of bookbags.

One of his teammates followed his gaze. "You and that girl really dug up a dog skeleton?"

"That's Morticia for you!" piped up the girl next to him. "She's always doing stuff like that."

"It wasn't her fault that that's where the bones were," shrugged Booth. "I was the one who was digging and hit them."

"Stuff like that happens around her," answered the girl. "Always."

"Her whole family disappeared last Christmas," Katie added in a hushed voice.

"And left her," chuckled the first girl. "She's in foster care now. She probably killed her parents and that's why her brother didn't want to keep her."

"Russ was really nice," said Katie. "Normal. Nothing at all like her. It was weird that they could be part of the same family. She was… even before this happened, every time we took a standardized test she got a perfect score. But she's such a palsy she can barely walk in a straight line. It was weird. No wonder he left and gave her to the government. No one wanted her."

To their credit, most of Booth's teammates looked horrified at the idea of a fifteen-year-old girl being abandoned by her family, but the story was hitting Booth where he lived.

Parents walked out without a goodbye or an explanation? Yeah, he'd lived that.

And then he'd gone and asked her if she was _lonely_.

Lunch tasted like sawdust in his mouth, and he sat quietly while his teammates and the girls chattered around him. Then he made an excuse about having an English paper due as soon as he got back to school to head over to the designated study area.

It wasn't even untrue. Since Booth was on scholarship (as long as his shoulder held out…) he was always aware of his need to keep his GPA at a certain level regardless of Coach throwing his books in his face.

Her eyes flicked warily to his when he approached, so he flashed her his most disarming smile. "Hey, Bones," he greeted her. He wasn't quite sure why the nickname fell out of his mouth. He just knew that bones were what she enjoyed. She'd told him herself.

She didn't answer.

"Want to help me with my homework?" he teased. He knew that people usually felt better when they felt like they were contributing something. She would respond better if he asked her for a favor than if he said that her classmates had just told him her life story and he felt sorry for her.

"Is it psychology?" she asked.

"Don't need help with psych," he told her cheerfully. "It's English." He handed her a half-written first draft of a term paper.

She took it and began to read with interest. After a moment, she asked for a pen. He gave it to her with some trepidation, and grew more and more concerned the more that she wrote. Finally, he seated himself beside her so he could look over her shoulder. She stiffened as if not used to the closeness.

He felt better when he saw what she was doing. She was actually going to save him a lot of time, and maybe a few points on his final grade. "My spelling isn't very good," he admitted.

"It's terrible," she confirmed. "You're obviously really smart, and this is a good paper, but no one is going to notice that if they keep getting distracted by the spelling."

"My teachers have told me that before."

"So why don't you get better at it?"

"Because I have four classes and basketball practice and frat stuff and a life," he told her. "And even if I didn't, I don't think it would ever come naturally to me. No one's good at everything."

She seemed to accept that, because a moment later she returned the paper with a suggestion that he rethink his opening line and swap his second and third paragraphs.

When she held the paper out to him, the sleeve of her shirt slid upwards to reveal an angry bruise on her forearm.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Dodgeball in gym. I'm… clumsy," she explained.

Clumsy she might be, but he had seen a lot of sports injuries and he knew what they looked like. He had also had a certain amount of experience with having his arm grabbed by someone who was bigger and stronger and angry. That was what this bruise looked like.

And there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

"Do you have any other homework?" she asked eagerly, and he handed her one of the books that was the subject of the term paper to skim. They discussed it that afternoon as they raked mulch over the flower beds and shoveled fresh gravel into the paths.

When it was time to leave, he couldn't do anything but tell her goodbye, and thank her for her help.

* * *

Tempe didn't expect the carpool back to her foster parents' house to be any different from the carpool to the park.

Sometimes- not often, but sometimes- Tempe was wrong.

"What were you and the hot guy talking about all day?" Cora wanted to know.

"He was trying to get you alone!" said Debbie. "And he was one of the older ones, I think he must have been a senior."

"He's twenty," Tempe said. "He's a sophomore. And we talked about school."

"School?" asked Debbie. "If he were talking to me, we would not be talking about school."

"I wouldn't want to _talk_ to him at all," said Cora, and Debbie exploded into laughter.

"I think their coach told them he'd do something really bad to them if they did anything like that," Debbie managed through her giggles.

"As he should have," said Mrs. Albertson, and Debbie and Cora rolled their eyes in a way that included Tempe, which was strange. For a minute, she almost enjoyed herself and wished that she didn't have to return to her foster parents' house.

Her good luck continued when she opened the door and smelled spaghetti with butter and cheese alongside steamed broccoli. It was the kind of meal she actually liked, far more than the constant menu of fish sticks and chicken nuggets that had been the usual dinner at her first foster home, where most of the foster children had been much younger than Tempe.

"Nice life, huh, Temperance?" asked her foster father. "You come home from a day in the park with your friends, and someone has a nice dinner waiting on the table for you."

"I'll do the dishes," she volunteered. That was always one of her assigned chores in any case.

"Yes, you will," he agreed. He tapped the blue serving bowl gently. "This belonged to my wife's late mother, so you are on notice: if you break it, you will not be going to your nice bedroom tonight to dream about your friends and your boyfriends and all the fun you had in the park. I will lock you in the trunk of the car to think about what you've done."

"Understood," said Tempe.

She would try.

But she was clumsy and she knew it.

The week before, she had tripped over an extension cord and had knocked a vase from the table in the living room. He foster father had grabbed her arm so tightly when he'd escorted her to her room that it had left a bruise.

No one had noticed the bruise, though, no one but Booth, the basketball-playing stranger who she would never see again.

Her heart was pounding and her breathing was shallow when she approached the sink and filled it with hot, soapy water.

She decided to wash the blue serving bowl first. If she got it out of the way, she wouldn't have to dread it while she washed the glasses and plates and pots and silverware.

 _Don't drop it,_ she told herself. _Don't drop it._

She plunged her hands into the sink. The water was scalding hot, probably too hot, but she grabbed a hold of the bowl anyway and pulled it from the water. She held on with her left hand and reached for the sponge with her right.

The soap was slippery.

 _Don't drop it._

She held on as hard as she could, but her fingers rebelled against the heat and the soap wasn't helping matters at all.

She tried to catch the bowl when it started to slip, but she was clumsy and she only succeeded in knocking the bowl halfway across the kitchen. It shattered on the hard tile floor.

Her foster mother shouted in dismay.

"You were warned," said her foster father.

She didn't fight when he shoved her into the trunk.

She had been warned.

* * *

Dinner with the team the night before the tournament was a raucous affair. The confidence, camaraderie, and good food were almost enough to keep Booth's mind off of the girl (God, she was younger than Jared) that he couldn't save.

They had an evening shootaround and an early curfew. Booth and his roommate, a senior named Al Thomas who was also one of his frat brothers, spent a few hours rehashing the team's chances in the tournament before they fell asleep.

Tempe spent the first night contemplating her failure as she had been instructed to do.

She had, after all, been warned that this would happen if she broke the dish.

 _It's not fair_ , a tiny voice whined in the back of her mind.

It was no revelation to her that life wasn't fair. If life was fair, she would have her parents and her brother. If life was fair, someone other than a stranger she met at community service day in the park would care about the bruise on her arm.

The fact that life was not fair had no relevance, and it was not rational to dwell on it.

* * *

Booth and his teammates were giddy with nerves and bloodlust on Sunday morning. They ate their breakfast quickly and were on the team bus ready to go even before the coaches arrived.

He was slightly uncomfortable about missing church, but he said a prayer silently to himself and knew that God would forgive him.

Their first game was a morning one, and Booth came close to a triple double: 15 points, 10 assists, 7 rebounds.

More importantly, his shoulder hurt only a little.

Most importantly, they won.

* * *

Tempe hurt like she'd never hurt before when morning came.

At least, she thought it was morning. She couldn't hear very much in the trunk, and she might have been wrong about the muffled sounds that drifted through to her being the morning songs of birds.

Every inch of her body was stiff. Her back, especially, ached.

 _It's not fair._

 _That's not relevant._

She began to wonder whether she should have fought back, but that wasn't relevant either. What was done was done.

She knew that it was noon when she heard the doors of her foster parents' other car slamming beside her prison. They returned from church at noon.

She was glad that God didn't really exist, because she didn't want to think of an omnipotent being who loved and supported people like the ones who had left her here.

* * *

The Sunday afternoon game was even better than the Sunday morning game. Booth's stats weren't as gaudy, but his team played gritty defense and upset the the favorite. A few of the girls from the community service thing the day before were in the stands. It didn't surprise him that his Bones wasn't there. He doubted that foster parents spontaneously took their kids to watch exhibition college basketball tournaments even if the kids liked basketball.

He felt a rush of gratitude for his grandparents.

When one of his teammates asked whether he had any use for the last few minutes of a calling card that was about to expire, Booth accepted and called home just to tell Jared and Pops and his grandmother that he loved them. Jared asked if he'd been drinking heavily. Pops asked for a play-by-play of the afternoon game. His grandmother just said that she loved him, too.

* * *

By Sunday afternoon, Tempe was hungry and thirsty. At first she'd been grateful that she hadn't drunk much water during the sunny Saturday in the park; that had allowed her to postpone the humiliation of wetting herself for almost a whole day. Now that that milestone had been passed, she wished that she had eaten and drunk everything in sight.

The kids who had grown up in the foster system were better about that. They had long since learned that food was not a given, and they stole and hoarded whatever they could, as well as taking advantage of every opportunity.

Tempe had spent the first fifteen years of her life in a home with two parents who not only made certain that she ate three meals a day, but had taken her preferences into account. She liked fish; fish was served often. It had been as simple as that.

It had left her with no skills to handle her new life.

She should have fought. She should have run. She knew that now.

She could apply that knowledge in the future, but she might not have a future. The learning experience might be moot.

* * *

Booth's team didn't play on Sunday evening, so they sat in the stands and watched the game that would determine who they would face on Monday. For the sake of confusing their potential opponents, the team had drawn straws to determine that half of them would openly cheer for one team while half would cheer for the other. That, they decided, would be more fun than sitting and watching stoically.

Booth had one team and Al had the other, and all through the first half they taunted each other as the teams traded off shots. When Booth's team threw in an unlikely buzzer-beater from halfcourt to take the lead as the half ended, Booth threw his arms in the air in victory.

His shoulder screamed with pain, so much so that Al eased him back down to his seat and called for the athletic trainer while one hand stayed planted firmly on Booth's back.

The pain abated enough for Booth to walk back to the training room under his own power, and it abated more as the trainer massaged his shoulder with practiced ease. "You need surgery, kid," the trainer diagnosed, not for the first time. "The longer you wait, the more damage you'll do."

He knew that. His friend Cam, who was pre-med, agreed with the team's diagnosis.

"But the surgery might not help," he said. "It might even make things worse." Cam had told him that, too.

"You aren't going to have a choice. You'll make it through this year, maybe, but you won't last through next. I have to tell Coach McKenna."

Booth had known it was coming. That didn't make the news any easier to take.

* * *

Tempe had slept on and off throughout the first day, but by Sunday night the hunger, thirst, stiffness, and pain combined to make further sleep impossible.

That was fine. She needed to be awake anyway.

She might be clumsy and awkward and unprepared for her new life, but she was _smart_.

She could think her way out of this. She just knew that she could.

She explored every inch of the dark trunk looking for a means of escape.

She found none.

She began again.

* * *

On Monday morning, Booth played terribly, his team was eliminated from the tournament, and the trainer told Coach about his shoulder.

There was nothing more to it.

The day sucked.

* * *

On Monday morning, Tempe wondered whether anyone would miss her when she didn't arrive at school.

She wondered whether someone on his or her way to work might hear her if she banged her fists against the inside of the trunk.

She hypothesized that the answer to both of her wonderings was no.

* * *

On Monday afternoon, Coach dragged the team out for a literal walk in the park and a lecture about how, while they hadn't won the tournament, they would leave this part of the world better than they had found it.

The garden did look nice, Booth thought sourly.

They crossed paths with a crowd of high-schoolers which included the girls from Saturday.

Booth looked desperately for Bones without knowing why he was so anxious.

She wasn't there.

"Looking for Mort- um, Tempe?" asked the one called Katie.

"Yes," he confirmed. "Where is she?"

"They said she was too sick to come to school today."

"She wasn't sick at all on Saturday," Booth objected.

"She had perfect attendance every year between first grade and fourth," said Katie. "She doesn't miss school. We hoped she'd run off with you."

Booth refrained from rolling his eyes. "Do you know where she lives?" he asked instead.

"No. But Cora carpooled with her on Saturday, so Cora will." Katie gestured to Cora, who Booth vaguely recognized, and Cora was prompted to scribble out an address on a scrap of paper. He thanked them both.

" _How does a girl like her get a guy like that?"_ he heard one whisper to the other as he walked away.

* * *

On Monday afternoon, the hunger and thirst and pain had passed.

Tempe's mind was awake, though, and she resented her apparent impending demise.

If she lived, she would do better.

She would fight.

She would run.

She would make something of herself.

* * *

Coach gave the team Monday evening off. Booth found himself with Al and Bryan, both of whom were old enough to drink and very much wanted to explore the local bar scene. They knew about Booth's shoulder, though, and they were loathe to leave him to his own devices.

He told them that it was fine, but that he doubted that legal drinking in a bar was more fun than illegal drinking in the frat house. They told him that he was probably right.

Booth fingered the scrap of paper in his pocket.

He was alone, and his gut still screamed at him to check on Bones.

His life sucked, but hers was worse.

God might be telling him something.

He flashed the paper at a cab driver and asked if he could be taken there. The cabbie agreed.

* * *

On Monday evening, Tempe fainted.

It didn't feel like sleep and she didn't like it.

* * *

 _ **To be concluded. Guess this one is a two shot.**_


	5. Teen Fic 2

**The Teen Fic- Conclusion**

* * *

Booth knocked on the door. It was answered by an impeccably dressed older man. He wondered if this was even the correct address.

He had to try.

"I'm a friend of Tempe's. From school," he began. He didn't really look like he could be a high school student even though he was all of two years removed from high school. He hadn't looked like a teenager when he'd been a teenager. He'd been too tall and too broad from a young age. "She wasn't there today, and I was wondering if I could bring her her homework."

The man's eyes skirted coolly over Booth, then darted to a car parked in the driveway.

"I don't see any homework."

 _Damn_. Booth should have thought his cover story through. "She's supposed to finish reading _The_ _Turn of the Screw_ ," he said. "I was just going to tell her."

"I'll pass the message along. Thank you."

"Can I see her?"

"She's far too ill." Again, the eyes assessed both Booth and the car.

Booth knew cars. There was nothing worth noticing about that one.

"She's never missed school like this."

"There's a first time for everything. Good day."

And the door closed in his face.

Booth walked down the block so that the man could watch him leave, then hid himself in the shadows and looped back the way he had come. He didn't see any lights on in the upstairs bedrooms where someone might be sick in bed.

Quietly, he crept toward the car and walked around it.

There was nothing special about it.

He peeked in the windows.

There was nothing special inside the car.

He tried the doors.

The back left door was unlocked, so he climbed inside and pushed the button to pop the trunk. If he didn't find anything there, he would make the long walk back to the team's hotel and resign himself to the fact that his gut and his brain functioned about as well as his shoulder.

He hoisted the trunk open.

* * *

The sudden jolt of fresh air was sickening.

She opened her eyes with a pained cry.

* * *

She was wearing the same clothes she'd been wearing 48 hours before. He knew because the dirt from the garden was still plastered to her jeans and sneakers. Her hair was still braided in a crown around her head.

His shoulder was a mess, but his gut and his brain had been right.

"Bones," he whispered. She looked closer to twelve years old than fifteen, semiconscious and contorted like a ragdoll. How had someone done this to a little girl who wasn't very much more than a child?

The same way his own father had done it to him and Jared, he supposed.

"All right, baby," he told her. "We're going to get you out of here, and then we're going to call the police." That was a solid plan.

She blinked owlishly at him. She'd had an opinion about everything two days before. Now she didn't seem to know what was going on.

"Do you think your back is hurt? I shouldn't pick you up if your back is hurt, but we shouldn't wait around for the sickos you live with to find us, either."

There was no answer but the unseeing blue-eyed stare.

He couldn't leave her there a moment longer. The risks were too great.

He snaked his good arm around her and lifted her clumsily from the trunk. She let out a strangled whimper and seemed slightly more aware of her surroundings, but the odds of her being able to walk away on her own two feet didn't seem good.

If it had been two days earlier, that wouldn't have been a problem. She was tall for a girl, but not as tall as he was, and she was slender to boot. He wouldn't have thought much about damaging his shoulder by carrying her to the nearest strip mall and pay phone.

Two days made a lot of difference.

"There's not really a choice, is there?" he asked her.

She gave no indication that she heard him.

"One of my arms is going under your legs, and the other's going behind your back, okay? If you can get your arm around my shoulders, that will help."

There was a searing pain when he lifted her, but after a moment of adjustment he found that he could manage it.

"Now we just need to hope no one gets the wrong idea," he murmured as he carried her down the street. _Nothing to see here. Just a high school girl and a college boy having some fun. Happens every day._

It was only two blocks to the strip mall. He managed to sit her on the curb while he called 911 and received assurances that help was on the way.

She shivered. Saturday had been a warm, sunny spring day; Monday evening was cool. He removed his jacket and draped it around her shoulders like he'd done with his dates on prom night back when he'd been her age.

She looked at him with something like curiosity.

"Help is coming," he assured her. He wondered what else he could say. What had Pops said when he'd taken his grandsons home? There had been promises, mostly, promises that Booth couldn't make to a girl who was alone in the world. "What they did to you was not acceptable," he tried. "You don't deserve this. You know that, right?"

When she pulled his jacket more tightly around her and leaned against him, he took it as a sign that she did know.

"My parents left me, too," he whispered. Not one of his frat brothers or teammates knew that. Some of them knew that he lived with his grandparents, but none of them knew why. Not even Coach knew precisely why. "First my mom, not that you could blame her after what my dad did. He never locked us in the trunk of a car but that was only because he was into the more active kind of violence. Us suffering when he couldn't see it wouldn't have done it for him. So no one missed him when he left. If my grandparents hadn't been there…"

Then there was a flash of sirens and he was ushered away to give a statement. His jacket was returned an hour later with nothing but a vague suggestion that her condition was stable.

* * *

The next thing that Tempe remembered was the scratch of a hospital gown against her skin.

"How did I get here?" she asked a nearby orderly.

"A good Samaritan," the orderly told her. "Don't worry about that now."

She thought again of how her foster parents had gone to church and left her in the trunk.

"I hate religion," she said.

* * *

Coach was sitting at the edge of the restaurant in the lobby with one eye on the door when Booth walked in with the police officers. The look of fury and disappointment on his face made Booth sick to his stomach, but he quickly set the feeling aside. "It's not what it looks like," he said as Coach strode angrily over to them. He'd meant to say it in a lighthearted way— it genuinely _wasn't_ what it looked like, after all— but the darkness of the day caught up with him and he wound up sounding like any other whiny kid barely out of his teens.

Coach ignored Booth entirely and focused his attention on the cops. "What has he done?" Booth was guilty until proven innocent. He doubted that anyone was going to look at Bones' foster parents that way.

The explanation was blissfully quick and to the point, and then the cops were out the door with a final compliment to Booth.

Coach clapped his hand on Booth's good shoulder. "Did you eat dinner, son?"

Booth ignored the pang that shot through him. Coach was a good man and a good coach, but Booth had been someone's son and it had gone badly. If anyone was entitled to call him _son_ ever again, it was Pops, but Pops carefully refrained from going there. "No," he admitted. Food had not been anywhere on his mind. The lost game, the lost basketball career, and the sight of Bones in the trunk of the car had been more than enough to kill his appetite.

Coach nodded and steered Booth back toward his table while gesturing at the waiter. "Bring him a cheeseburger and fries, please," he directed. "That okay?" he asked Booth as an afterthought. Since the entire team subsisted on burgers and fries whenever possible, the order hadn't exactly been presumptuous.

"Maybe you'll take some criminal justice courses next semester," Coach mused. "You seem to have an aptitude for it."

Booth stared at Coach in disbelief. "There isn't going to be a next semester. My shoulder didn't hold up and my scholarship is gone."

"The scholarship isn't gone yet and we aren't sure that it will be. In the meantime, we'll think about what you want out of school other than basketball. I promised your grandparents that you'd get an education, too, when you came to play for me."

That was Coach's pitch when he recruited high school basketball players. He didn't get the most elite players, the All Americans with their pictures on _Sports Illustrated_. But he did very well with the mid-tier players by promising their families that if he didn't always turn out professional athletes (although that happened often enough), he did always turn out full-grown men.

As it turned out, that wasn't just a thing Coach said.

When Booth got back to the frat house and dug a course catalogue out from under his roommate's bed, he was surprised to notice that he had the prerequisites for the mid-level criminology courses thanks to the psych classes he had already taken.

At the end of the school year he preregistered for them even with the belief that his scholarship had evaporated and he would never return.

* * *

When Tempe was released from the hospital, her social worker placed her in a temporary home. All the homes were temporary, and none of them were really homes, but she still felt too tired and groggy to explain that the turn of phrase was meaningless and imprecise.

The people there were kind and gentle, but she didn't let herself get used to it. She knew that the situation would last only until legal proceedings against her former foster parents were complete.

The legal proceedings turned out to be uncomplicated; Tempe didn't have to testify beyond the statement that she'd given in the hospital. It wasn't until the social worker mentioned the statement of the young man who had called 911— Seeley Booth— that she had a vague memory of a jacket around her shoulders and a whisper in her ear.

" _You don't deserve this. You know that, right?"_

She pushed the memory right back out of her mind. It was too hard to think of nice things in the past; she wasn't going to think of Booth, just like she wasn't going to think of her parents or Russ.

She wasn't going to wonder whether he'd really told her a story about losing his own parents, or whether that was some concoction of her own delirium. She wasn't going to wonder whether the story was true, if he had told it, or whether it was something he had fabricated to make her feel less alone.

Making her feel less alone wasn't possible. Alone was what she had, and she would be alone until she loved it.

She knew vaguely that she should thank him. He was a star college basketball player, and it wouldn't be difficult to track him down.

But he was in the past.

She was someone else now, and she had to prepare for the years ahead of her.

* * *

The first year was the year Tempe lived in six foster homes and attended four different high schools. The first three schools were a welcome change from the one where everyone had known her family and Russ. The fourth school was too close to her original school for comfort, and in no time she was called Morticia again. Sometimes, for variation, her classmates called her Jenny Dahmer.

The custodian was kind to her, and she vowed that one day when she'd made something of herself she would repay him.

* * *

The second year was the year that Booth enlisted.

The camaraderie and sense of purpose were just what he needed.

* * *

The third year was the year that Tempe started college. She chose her own academic courses and her own meals and enrolled in every self-defense class that she could find. She was no longer at the mercy of the foster system, but she was never again going to go down without a fight.

* * *

The fourth year was the year that Booth made his first kill as a sniper.

It was a hard thing to know that he had taken a life, but he was fighting for his country and he trusted his orders.

* * *

The fifth year was the year that Tempe received her undergraduate degree in anthropology. College had been an acceptable experience, but she was ready for a real challenge.

* * *

The sixth year was the year that Booth was captured in lifeless desert in a far-flung corner of the world. As he stared down death and took stock of his life, he thought of his family and his friends and his girlfriends and his fellow soldiers and his teammates.

He also wondered, just for a moment, what had become of the girl he'd nicknamed Bones.

* * *

The seventh year was the year that Tempe met Michael Stires. He was her professor and her first lover.

She wondered, just for a moment, what had become of the boy who had pulled her into his arms when he'd rescued her from the trunk of her foster parents' car. She still remembered enough about him to track him down, of course, but she didn't try. The past was in the past.

* * *

The eighth year was the year that Rebecca told Booth that he was going to be a father- but not a husband.

* * *

The ninth year was the year that Dr. Brennan, now in possession of three doctorates, took a position at the Jeffersonian.

* * *

The tenth year was the year that Agent Booth became Special Agent in Charge.

* * *

The eleventh year was the year that Brennan met both Zack Addy, who would become her prized student, and Angela Montenegro, who would become her best friend.

* * *

The twelfth year was the year that Deputy Director Cullen arrived in Booth's office with a sympathetic smirk on his face.

"I have a special assignment for you, Agent Booth," he declared regally.

"Ready to serve, Sir," said Booth. He'd spent a _long_ time in the army.

"I'm afraid that nothing in your experience as a soldier or an agent has prepared you for this." Cullen looked so serious that Booth almost worried. "You're aware of the case involving the four skeletons found in the landfill?"

Booth nodded. There was nothing left but the bones. They had been there for quite some time, but one of the agents had been led to them by a brain-addled witness to a more recent crime.

"Our people haven't been able to learn a damn thing about those bones."

"Our people are the best," said Booth, mystified. If the FBI couldn't do it, it likely couldn't be done.

"Not at this, they aren't. There's a forensic anthropologist right here in DC at the Jeffersonian. She's the best in the world, and the Director of the Jeffersonian has graciously agreed to loan her talents to us for this investigation."

"That sounds like a good thing," said Booth slowly. "Why is it not a good thing?"

"She hates the FBI, she hates being loaned out, and she hates people she who are less intelligent than she is- and incidentally, everyone is less intelligent than she is." Cullen slapped the file on Booth's desk. "This is now your personal assignment and your number one priority. Good luck."

With that, Cullen was gone. Booth reviewed the contents of the file. He doubted that there was anything that this Dr. Brennan could discover from the bones, but he had his marching orders and he was a good soldier.

* * *

"I can't believe that you loaned me out!" snapped Brennan at Dr. Goodman. "I'm not a cup of flour, and the FBI has no respect for what we do."

"You tell him," muttered Dr. Hodgins as he brushed past them in the hall.

"These bones have been lying in a landfill for decades. Don't you have any interest in finding out who those people were? Perhaps giving their families some peace of mind?"

Brennan seethed inwardly. Dr. Goodman knew just what to say to make her comply. "I'll do it for them, then. But not for the FBI. And I'm not going to be polite to the agent they send to stand over my shoulder."

"Baby steps, I suppose," said Dr. Goodman in a low voice as he escorted Brennan to the bone room.

From the back, the agent looked exactly like every other agent she'd ever seen, and she paid him very little mind. Military posture; boring, expensive suit; and radiating a smug confidence that he would get his way as he waved off the Jeffersonian's own security and turned to shake Dr. Goodman's hand. "Special Agent Seeley Booth," he said, just as she caught sight of his face.

She had never in her life understood what it meant to go weak in the knees. She hadn't experienced it as a sheltered child with Andy Fluger, the varsity lacrosse captain; she hadn't experienced it as Michael Stires' eager student.

She almost had to grab the table for support when she looked into the face of Seeley Booth for the first time in a dozen years.

"This is Dr. Temperance Brennan," Dr. Goodman intoned. "She'll be happy to help you in any way that she can."

"Yes," Brennan agreed. "I will give you whatever assistance you require. I'm looking forward to it."

Dr. Goodman did a doubletake that was almost comical.

Booth shook her hand, too, and she could tell that he remembered her. "We appreciate your help. This is a tough one."

"Then we should get started."

With one last odd look, Dr. Goodman left them alone.

Not knowing what to say to Booth, Brennan lunged for the remains. She understood bones.

"A park outside Chicago," said Booth quietly. "Spring 1992. It was community service day for the high schools."

She stared harder at the bones. "No one around here knows very much about my past," she said. "Please don't tell them."

"Of course not. I don't go around telling just anyone about my parents, either. The only people who know are the people who have clearance to read all of my personnel file and you, if you remember what I told you."

"I didn't know if that was true," she admitted. "I thought maybe you were making things up to make me feel better."

He touched her arm and gestured that she should face him. "No," he said as he shook his head. "I told you the truth."

Facing him was easier than she'd thought it would be. "Thank you," she said. "For what you did back then."

"You're welcome. I'm glad you're all right. I always wondered."

"You're FBI. You couldn't have looked me up?"

"I thought that if you wanted to be found, you would have done the looking. You deserved your privacy if that was what you wanted."

"Thank you," she said again.

"I should be thanking you. You helped me find some direction when I really needed it."

"You needed a direction other than frat boy jock?" she asked.

"My shoulder crapped out the weekend I met you, so yes, I did. I started taking criminal justice courses. I probably would have ended up in the army one way or another, but I think you made it easier."

It was too much, and the memories were too strong. "Tell me everything you know about these bones," she said abruptly, and he did.

* * *

For the next two days, Brennan ate, breathed, and slept the four sets of bones. She pushed Zack harder than she'd ever pushed him. She bribed Angela into helping with the facial reconstruction. She even managed to get Dr. Hodgins to help by identifying the particulates that the FBI hadn't removed in its ineptness.

They found cause of death.

They found identities.

Agent Booth found his killer and invited Brennan to dinner to celebrate.

"He should really invite all of us," Brennan told Angela. "We all helped."

Angela shook her head fondly. "No, Sweetie. He's not really asking you to celebrate catching a murderer. He's asking you because he's into you."

"He's not," Brennan corrected, because she wasn't going to explain that a man who had watched her classmates call her Morticia and her foster parents lock her in the trunk of a car for two days was never going to find her attractive.

"Don't you think he's cute?" Angela pushed. "Because I think he's the best looking thing I've ever seen other than a one way plane ticket to Paris."

"Then you go to dinner with him."

"He asked you. So as your friend, I have to ask you to let me live vicariously through you."

Brennan sighed in exasperation.

"Be ready for the kiss," said Angela.

* * *

Brennan wasn't good at social situations and she didn't usually enjoy them. She did enjoy watching Booth talk about how happy his superiors were and how he hoped that the FBI and the Jeffersonian could work together again.

"Only if it's you," she told him honestly. "You're the only FBI agent I've ever met who didn't completely dismiss everything that I do."

"I had a head start in understanding how brilliant you are."

"I'm the best in the world at what I do. Everyone should understand how brilliant I am."

He laughed. "People don't work that way. They don't just hear something and understand it."

"I do."

"Well, you're the best in the world."

Their waitress approached with a tray of drinks. "That's what we like to hear," she said far too cheerily. "Couples keeping the romance alive." She didn't seem to notice or care when they tried to correct her assumption.

"So, do you have a girlfriend?" asked Brennan. Angela would want a report.

Booth shook his head. "No. Been on a few dates with a woman recently and she's nice. But it's not a relationship. You?"

"The same."

He scooted closer to her. "So if you got an offer from another man…" he raised his eyebrows suggestively.

"If that man were you, I would say yes."

Angela was going to gloat when she heard about the kiss.

The kiss was good enough to be more than worth it.

 **The End**


End file.
